Cinemania 1997 doc id 117144 Nieznany

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1

Louis Lumiére (1864 - 1948)
The two flowing rivers of the birth of film are considered to be Thomas Edison and Louis
and Auguste Lumiére. Edison was the Grand Showman, recording music hall turns inside
his barnlike studio with a monstrous, cumbersome camera. The Lumiéres were Grand
Documentarians, taking to the Parisian streets with their cinématographe and photographing
everyday occurences, displaying a joy in movement and commonplace realities, celebrating
the mundane as a lifeforce.
From the first, the Lumiéres were technicians. Their father, Antoine, was a well-known
portrait painter who gave up paint for financial rewards in the business of photographic
supplies. Antoine sent his sons to technical school, but because of recurring headaches, Louis
left the school early and began experimenting with his father's photographic apparatus. In the
process, he discovered a new process for the preparation of photographic plates and a factory
was built to manufacture them. By 1895, the Lumiére factory was the leading European
manufacturer of photographic products, employing over 300 workers. Like Edison, the
Lumiéres had become successful inventor-businessmen.
An invitational demonstration of the Edison Kinetoscope, a parlor peephole machine, in Paris
in 1894, sparked the Lumiéres' interest in motion pictures and the brothers set out to devise a
machine that would combine motion picture movement with front projection. In 1895, Louis
came up with such a device, and the cinématographe was patented in his name.
With the cinématographe, the emphasis of the nascent motion picture form was dramatically
changed. Edison's bulky, stationary camera forced its subjects to display themselves in front
of the camera as objects of a performance. The cinématographe, on the other hand, was not
bulky but lightweight (about five kilograms), hand-cranked and not bound to a studio. The
Lumičre camera reduced the frames-per-second (f.p.s.) speed from Edison's 48 to 16, using
less film and reducing the clatter and grinding of the Edison camera. The cinématographe was
also unique in that the same housing functioned as a camera, projector and printer.
And, perhaps most importantly of all, the Lumiére’s applied the principle of intermittent
movement to film projection, allowing smooth-running projection through the film gate—an
idea Edison had rejected as he struggled to perfect projection using continuous movement past
the film gate. The Lumiéres' technical innovations allowed the motion pictures to venture into
the world outside of a studio, permitting any object in reality to become a subject of interest
for the camera.
From their first film, WORKERS LEAVING THE LUMIÉRE FACTORY (1895)/LA
SORTIE DES USINES, the Lumiéres made everyday processes their subjects. In 1895, they
recorded over 20 subjects, including L'ARRIVÉE D'UN TRAIN EN GARE/ARRIVAL
OF A TRAIN, LE REPAS DE BÉBÉ/FEEDING THE BABY, L'ARROSEUR ARROSÉE/
WATERING THE GARDENER, DEMOLITION D'UN MUR/THE + FALLING WALL and
COURSE EN SACS/THE SACK RACE.
At first, the Lumiéres kept their invention a secret, only demonstrating the cinématographe at
private screenings, first at a March 22, 1895, industrial meeting in Paris and later at a June 10
meeting of photographers at Lyon. These private exhibitions were met with great enthusiasm,
and, on December 28, 1895, the Lumiéres held their first public screening at the Grand Café
on the Boulevard des Capucines. The reaction was sensational and before long there were 20
showings a day to meet the tremendous public demand. The success spurred the Lumiéres to
debut the cinématographe in England, Belgium, Holland, and Germany.
By 1897, the Lumiéres were a global success, training hundreds of operators and expanding
their film catalog to over 750 titles. But after the Paris Exposition of 1900, during which they
projected a film on a mammoth 99 x 79-foot screen, the brothers decided to curtail their film

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exhibitions and devote themselves to the manufacture and sale of their inventions.
As inventors and businessmen, the Lumiéres were perhaps uneasy shooting film subjects in
an area that had begun to attract burgeoning film artists. While Edison stubbornly struggled
to hold back the clock, forming a trust to quash up-and-coming filmmakers, the Lumiéres'
withdrawal from the vanguard of filmmaking opened the door for others to advance the
aesthetic side of film.
Nevertheless, during their brief careers in production, the Lumiéres brought filmmaking
to five continents, demonstrated the beauty of movement in the mundane, and forever
enshrined "cinema" as the art form of the 20th century.

Georges Méliès (1861 - 1938)
One of the visionary pioneers of the cinema, Georges Méliès was born to a boot manufacturer
and passed through adolescence exhibiting two talents: for drawing and for making cardboard
Punch & Judy shows. During his military service he was stationed near the home of Robert
Houdin, the magician whose optical illusions had captivated Méliès as a child, and whose
theater he would eventually buy after he escaped from his family job as overseer of factory
machinery.
When the Lumiere brothers (Louis and Auguste) unveiled their Cinématographe in public on
December 28, 1895, Méliès was not only present, but clearly the most affected member of the
audience. Frustrated when the Lumieres would not sell him the machine, he sought out R.W.
Paul and his Animatographe in London. Méliès then built his own camera-projector and was
able to present his first film screening on April 4, 1896.
Méliès began by screening the films of others, mainly those made on the Edison Kinetoscope,
but within months he was showing his own works; these were apparently one-reel views,
usually consisting of one shot lasting sixty seconds. Although Méliès is often credited with
inventing the narrative film by relating stories as opposed to simply depicting landscapes or
single events, this is not strictly true; many of the Lumiere brothers' films were also much
more than simple, static views. Méliès's signal contribution to the cinema was to combine
his experience as a magician and theater owner with the new invention of motion pictures in
order to present spectacles of a kind not possible in the live theater.
Within nine months, Méliès had increased the length of the filmed entertainment (his last
film of 1896 consisted of three, three-minute reels) and was making regular use of previously
unimaginable special effects, such as making performers disappear by stopping his camera
in mid-shot. As the year ended he was also completing a glass-walled studio where he could
make films without fear of the elements.
From 1897 to 1904 Méliès made hundreds of films, the great majority now lost. The scores
of prints which survive show why his contemporaries were both initially impressed, and
ultimately bored. Méliès regarded the story in his films to be a mere "thread intended to link
the 'effects' … I was appealing to the spectator's eyes alone." Failing to develop any consistent
ideas, his entertainments consisted only of a succession of magical tableaux peopled by
Méliès (who often dressed as the conjurer or the devil) and young women recruited from the
theaters of Paris, performing against flat, painted backdrops.
Méliès's own resources and interest in these films apparently began to dwindle after 1905,
partly due to competition from other filmmakers and rising costs, partly because of the
growing industrialization of the French film industry, and partly due to his wish to continue
presenting live programs at the Théâtre Robert Houdin. By 1911 he had ceased independent
distribution; by the time France entered WWI in 1914 his career as a producer-director
had ended. His best-known surviving works are A TRIP TO THE MOON (1902), THE
MELOMANIAC (1903), AN IMPOSSIBLE VOYAGE (1904) and THE CONQUEST OF
THE POLE, (1912, his last year of production).

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Léon Gaumont (1864 - 1946)
A merchant of photographic equipment, in 1895 he established the Gaumont company and in
the following year began manufacturing motion picture apparatus. The commercial success
of his chronotographe, a camera-projector developed by Georges Demeny, encouraged him
to expand his activity into the production of films. The regular director of his films through
1907 was Alice Guy. Later directors included Louis Feuillade, Jacques Feyder, and Marcel
L'Herbier. At the same time, Gaumont began experimenting with various film devices. One
of his early inventions, in 1902, was the Chronophone, a sound system synchronizing motion
pictures with a record player. His company expanded rapidly and soon comprised studios,
labs, and a growing chain of movie theaters in Paris and other cities. After 1907 it extended
its business activities into England, Germany, Russia, and even the United States. Gaumont
continued with his technical research throughout the company's expansion.
In 1912 he introduced a program of "talking movies" into one of his Paris theaters, using an
improved version of his Chronophone. In the same year he patented a three-color additive
process, the Chronochrome, and in 1918 produced a short color film with that system. In
1928 he developed a sound system, which was used in the production of the first French
talkie, EAU DE NIL. However, the system was imperfect and was soon dropped. Gaumont's
retirement from the business in 1929 ended an era marked by the complete dominance of the
French film industry by two pioneer giants—Léon Gaumont and Charles Pathé.

Charles Pathé (1863 - 1957)
He was the son of a pork butcher and a cook and joined the labor force at age 12. After five
years of military service, he went to Argentina hoping to make a fortune but returned to
France empty-handed in 1891. He tried several occupations without success and then, in
1894, he finally hit the jackpot when he bought an Edison phonograph and began exhibiting
it at fairs all over France. Business was good and within several months he was an established
importer and merchant of phonographs. By 1896 he had extended his business interests to
include the sale of motion picture projectors and even directed a number of simple films
in imitation of Lumiére. The same year, he founded with his brothers Émile, Jacques, and
Théophile, the Pathé Fréres company.
The sale of phonographs constituted the major source of Pathé Fréres' profits until 1901.
In that year Charles left the phonograph end of the business in Émile's charge (Jacques and
Théophile had by then left the company) and began devoting his energies to film production,
with the aid of director-producer Ferdinand Zecca. In 1902, Pathé built a studio in Vincennes
and began turning out short films assembly-line style, at the rate of one or two a day. The
following year he began forming foreign branches, at first in London, then in Moscow
and New York. Before long Pathé branches were popping up in such other faraway places
as Kiev, Budapest, Calcutta, and Singapore. By 1908, the Pathé Fréres company was an
international empire, selling twice as many films in the United States as all American
companies combined. It was by far the world's largest movie producer. Expanding rapidly,
Pathé went into the manufacturing of raw film and motion picture equipment and virtually
monopolized the business by building studios, laboratories, and motion picture theaters.
The company developed a color process, Pathé-Color, and launched the world's first weekly
newsreel, "Pathé-Journal," made in France as well as in other countries, including the US.
With WWI shutting down some of his operations in France and causing chaotic conditions
in others, Pathé came to the US at the end of 1914 and centered his efforts on solidifying the
position of his American branch, the Pathé Exchange. When Pathé returned home in 1917,
he found conditions profoundly changed. Production costs had soared and the local market
was saturated with foreign films, mostly American. Foreign markets, on the other hand,

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especially the American market, were turning French exports down. In desperation he ordered
his filmmakers to produce films geared specifically to the American taste, but he could not
stop the trend. In 1918 he began the long and agonizing process of divesting his empire of its
various branches and affiliates. In 1929 he sold his last interest in the business and retired to
the Riviera.

Film d'Art
French production company founded in 1908 to bring films of artistic merit to an elite,
educated audience. The company's output, beginning with THE ASSASSINATION OF THE
DUC DE GUISE (1908), featured renowned players from the Comédie Française under the
direction of leading contemporary figures such as Abel Gance. Mostly static recordings of the
established theatrical repertoire, these features did little to advance filmic art but nevertheless
earned a new prestige for the medium.
The first Film d'Art production to reach the U.S. was QUEEN ELIZABETH (1912), starring
Sarah Bernhardt. Distributed by Adolph Zukor, the film was a huge success, influencing
Zukor to form his Famous Players in Famous Plays Company (which later evolved into
Paramount) and proving that feature-length films could be commercially profitable.

Louis Feuillade (1873 - 1925)
Prolific director of over 700 films, most of them short or medium-length. Feuillade began
his career with Gaumont where, as well as directing his own features, he was appointed
artistic director in charge of production in 1907. Feuillade's work was largely comprised
of film series; his first series, begun in 1910 and numbering 15 episodes, was LE FILM
ESTHÉTIQUE, a financially unsuccessful attempt at "high-brow" cinema. More popular was
LIFE AS IT IS (1911-13), which moved from the costume pageantry of his earlier work to
a more realistic, if somewhat melodramatic, depiction of contemporary life. Feuillade also
directed scores of short films featuring the characters Bébé and Bout-de-zan.
Feuillade's most successful feature-length serials were FANTÔMAS (1913), which chronicled
the diabolical exploits of the "emperor of crime," and LES VAMPIRES (1915), which
trailed a criminal gang led by Irma Vep (Musidora) and was noted for its imaginative use of
locations and lyrical, almost surreal style.
1913

FANTÔMAS director, screenwriter

1913

JUVE CONTRE FANTÔMAS

director, screenwriter

1913

LE MORT QUI TUE director, screenwriter

1914

FANTÔMAS CONTRE FANTÔMAS

director, screenwriter

1914

LE FAUX MAGISTRAT

director, screenwriter

1915

LES VAMPIRES

director, screenwriter

1916

JUDEX

director, screenwriter

1916

L'AVENTURE DES MILLIONS

director, screenwriter

1916

NOTRE PAUVRE COEUR director, screenwriter

1916

UN MARIAGE DE RAISONdirector, screenwriter

1917

LA DESERTEUSE

director, screenwriter

1917

LA NOUVELLE MISSION DE JUDEX

director, screenwriter

1917

LE PASSE DE MONIQUE

director, screenwriter

1918

LES PETITES MARIONNETTES

director, screenwriter

1918

TIH MINH

director, screenwriter

1918

VENDEMIAIRE

director, screenwriter

1919

BARRABAS director, screenwriter

1919

L'ENGRENAGE

director, screenwriter

1919

L'HOMME SANS VISAGE director, screenwriter

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1920

LES DEUX GAMINES

director, screenwriter

1921

L'ORPHELINE

director, screenwriter

1921

PARISETTE director, screenwriter

1922

LE FILS DU FILIBUSTIER director, screenwriter

1923

L'ORPHELIN DE PARIS

director, screenwriter

1923

LA GOSSELINE

director, screenwriter

1923

LE GAMIN DE PARIS

director, screenwriter

1923

VINDICTA

director, screenwriter

1924

LA FILLE BIEN GARDÉE director, screenwriter

1924

LE STIGMATE

director, screenwriter

1924

LUCETTE

director, screenwriter

1924

PIERROT, PIERRETTE

director, screenwriter


Max Linder (1883 - 1925)
At 17 he left high school to study drama and soon after began an acting career on the
Bordeaux stage. He moved to Paris in 1904 and started playing supporting parts in
melodramas. In 1905 he embarked upon a parallel career in Pathé films. For three years he
spent his days in the film studios and his evenings on the stage, using his real name in the
theater and the pseudonym Max Linder on the screen. By 1908 he had given up the stage to
concentrate on his increasingly successful screen career. By 1910 he was an internationally
popular comedian, possibly the best-known screen comic on either side of the Atlantic in the
years before WWI. Typically playing a dapper dandy of the idle class, he developed a style of
slapstick silent screen comedy that anticipated Mack Sennett and Chaplin and set the premises
of the genre for years to come. Ferdinand Zecca, Louis Gasnier, and Alberto Capelani were
among the directors of his earliest films.
By 1910, Linder was writing and supervising, and from 1911 also directing, all his own films.
His popularity was at its peak in 1914, when he was called to arms. Early in the war he was
a victim of gas poisoning and suffered a serious breakdown. The injury was to have a lasting
effect on his physical and mental well-being. He returned briefly to French films, but finding
his popularity vanishing, he accepted a bid from Essanay and left for the US late in 1916.
Continuous ill health hampered the American phase of Linder's career from the start. In mid-
1917, after only three films, he was felled by double pneumonia and spent nearly a year
recovering in a Swiss sanitarium. When he returned to the US in 1921, he formed his own
production unit, releasing through United Artists. But after making only three more American
films, including the celebrated parody (of Fairbanks's THE THREE MUSKETEERS) THE
THREE MUST-GET-THERES (1922), he returned to Europe, where he married the daughter
of a Paris restaurateur in 1923. Linder made two more film appearances, one in France, the
other in Austria, but realized his career was finished. In 1925 he entered a suicide pact with
his wife. Their bodies were discovered side by side in a Paris hotel. He remained forgotten for
years, until the 60s, when many of his old films began turning up, affording film historians an
opportunity to evaluate his career and his contributions to the evolution of screen comedy.
1905

LA PREMIČRE SORTIE D'UN COLLEGIEN

performer

1906

LE POISON

performer

1908

UNE CONQUĘETE performer

1909

LE PETIT JEUNE HOMME performer

1909

UN MARIAGE Ŕ L'AMÉRICAIN

performer

1910

MAX AERONAUTE performer

1910

MAX CHAMPION DE BOXE

performer

1910

MAX SE MARIE

performer

1911

MAX DANS SA FAMILLE director, performer

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1912

LE MAL DE MER

director, performer

1912

MAX ET LES FEMMES

director, performer

1913

MAX ASTHMATIQUE

director, performer

1913

MAX VIRTUOSE

director, performer

1914

MAX DANS LES AIRES

director, performer

1915

MAX ET L'ESPION director, performer

1917

MAX COMES ACROSS

director, performer

1917

MAX IN A TAXI

director, performer

1917

MAX WANTS A DIVORCE director, performer

1919

LE PETIT CAFÉ

director, performer

1920

LE FEU SACRÉ

performer

1921

BE MY WIFE director, performer

1921

SEVEN YEARS BAD LUCK

director, performer

1922

THE THREE MUST-GET-THERES director, performer

1923

AU SECOURS!

performer

1924

LE ROI DU CIRQUE/DER ZIRKUSKÖNIG/KING OF THE CIRCUS

co-

director— with E. E. Violet, performer

Cecil Hepworth (1874 - 1953)
Pioneering British filmmaker who patented several inventions and published one of the first
books on film, Animated Photography, or the ABC of the Cinematograph (1897). Hepworth
set up a studio and laboratory and made several documentaries as well as the remarkably
advanced narrative short, RESCUED BY ROVER (1905). He was a major figure in British
cinema until the end of WWI, primarily as a producer.
The postwar slump that disabled the entire British film industry forced Hepworth out of
business in the early 1920s. He later lectured on the history of cinema and made trailers and
advertising shorts.
1899

EXPRESS TRAIN IN A RAILWAY CUTTING

producer, director, photography

1900

THE ECCENTRIC DANCER

producer, director, photography

1900

THE EXPLOSION OF A MOTOR CAR

producer, director, photography

1900

HOW IT FEELS TO BE RUN OVER

producer, director, photography

1900

THE KISS

producer, director, photography

1901

CORONATION OF KING EDWARD VII producer, director, photography

1901

FUNERAL OF QUEEN VICTORIA producer, director, photography

1901

THE GLUTTON'S NIGHTMARE

producer, director, photography

1901

HOW THE BURGLAR TRICKED THE BOBBY

producer, director, photography

1902

THE CALL TO ARMS

producer, director, photography

1902

HOW TO STOP A MOTOR CAR

producer, director, photography

1903

ALICE IN WONDERLAND producer, director, photography

1903

FIREMEN TO THE RESCUE

producer, director, photography

1904

THE JONAH MAN

producer, director, photography

1905

THE ALIEN'S INVASION

producer, director, photography

1905

A DEN OF THIEVESproducer, director, photography

1905

FALSELY ACCUSED

producer, director, photography

1905

RESCUED BY ROVER

producer, director, performer

1907

A SEASIDE GIRL

producer, director, photography

1908

JOHN GILPIN'S RIDE

producer, director, photography

1909

TILLY THE TOMBOY

producer, director, photography

1911

RACHEL'S SIN

producer, director, photography

1915

THE BASILISK

producer, director

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1915

THE BATTLE

producer, director

1915

THE CANKER OF JEALOUSY

producer, director

1915

IRIS

producer, director

1915

THE MAN WHO STAYED AT HOME

producer, director

1915

THE OUTRAGE

producer, director

1915

SWEET LAVENDERproducer, director

1915

TIME THE GREAT HEALER

producer, director

1916

ANNIE LAURIE

producer, director

1916

THE COBWEB

producer, director

1916

COMIN' THRO' THE RYE producer, director

1916

SOWING THE WIND

producer, director

1917

THE AMERICAN HEIRESS producer, director

1917

NEARER MY GOD TO THEE

producer, director

1918

THE BLINDNESS OF FORTUNE

producer, director

1918

BOUNDARY HOUSE

producer, director

1919

THE FOREST ON THE HILL

producer, director

1919

THE NATURE OF THE BEAST

producer, director

1919

SHEBA

producer, director

1920

ALF'S BUTTON

producer, director

1920

ANNA THE ADVENTURESS

producer, director

1920

HELEN OF FOUR GATES producer, director

1921

NARROW VALLEY producer, director

1921

TINTED VENUS

producer, director

1921

WILD HEATHER

producer, director

1922

COMIN' THRO' THE RYE producer, director

1922

MIST IN THE VALLEY

producer, director

1922

PIPES OF PAN

producer, director

1927

THE HOUSE OF MARNEY producer, director


George Albert Smith (1864 - 1959)
An established portrait photographer, he built his own movie camera in 1896 and began
making films the following year. A prodigious innovator, he rivaled France's Méliès in
devising special effects for his trick films. As early as 1897 he patented double exposure as a
filmic device and in 1900 pioneered in the use of the close-up as an intercut. In 1900, forming
a partnership with Charles Urban, he built one of the world's first motion picture studios, in
Brighton. Almost from the beginning of his involvement with film, he sought to develop a
satisfactory color technique. In 1906 he patented Kinemacolor and in 1908 he formed with
Urban the Natural Color Kinematograph Company for the commercial exploitation of the
two-color process.
1897

THE CORSICAN BROTHERS

director

1897

THE HAUNTED CASTLE

director

1898

CINDERELLA

director

1898

FAUST AND MEPHISTOPHELES director

1898

THE MILLER AND THE SWEEP

director

1898

WAVES AND SPRAY

director

1899

ALADDIN AND THE WONDERFUL LAMP

director

1899

THE LEGACY

director

1900

GRANDMA'S READING GLASS

director

1900

THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT director

1902

MOTHER GOOSE NURSERY RHYMES director

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1903

DOROTHY'S DREAM

director

1909

KINEMACOLOR PUZZLE director


Giovanni Pastrone (1883 - 1959)
A leading figure in the formative years of Italian cinema, he began in 1905 as an administrator
and technical pioneer, then (1908) began producing and directing. His monumental CABIRIA
(1914) is a landmark in the history of films. He often used the pseudonym Piero Fosco.
1908

GIORDANO BRUNO

director

1909

LA MASCHERA DI FERROdirector

1910

AGNESE VISCONTI director

1910

THE FALL OF TROY/LA CADUTA DI TROIA

director

1910

LUCIA DE LAMMERMOOR

director

1910

MANON LESCAUT director

1912

PADRE

director

1914

CABIRIA

director

1915

IL FUOCO

director

1915

MASCISTE

director

1916

TIGRE REALE

director

1919

HEDDA GABLER

director

1923

POVERE BIMBE

director


Mauritz Stiller (1883 - 1928)
One of the two dominant figures of theGolden Age of Swedish silent cinema (the other being
Victor Sjöström), whose reputation as a director has been somewhat overshadowed by his
fame as mentor and "discoverer" of Greta Garbo.
Of Russian-Jewish parentage, Stiller moved from Finland to Sweden at the age of 20 (fleeing
service in the Russian Army) and with little acting talent and good looks became a leading
stage actor and later director. Charles Magnusson hired both Stiller and Sjöström in 1912 to
work at Svensk Biograf (later Svensk Filmindustri) and together they produced some of the
most exquisite and sophisticated works of the silent era, propelling the Swedish cinema into
the European vanguard.
Stiller possessed an exquisite visual sensibility, combining naturalism and lyricism to great
effect. Though a versatile talent, he is best known for his astute social comedies, from LOVE
AND JOURNALISM (1916) to the internationally successful EROTIKON (1920), both
starring Karin Molander. Stiller also made a number of fine literary adaptations, including
three from the novels of Selma Lagerlöf: SIR ARNE'S TREASURE (1919), GUNNAR
HEDE'S SAGA (1922) and THE ATONEMENT OF GOSTA BERLING (1924). The latter
film introduced the world to Garbo and earned Stiller an invitation to Hollywood from Louis
B. Mayer—which the director accepted on the condition that his protégée accompany him.
Garbo was immediately groomed for stardom while Stiller experienced constant conflicts
with the constraints of the American studio system. The first Garbo vehicle he directed,
THE TEMPTRESS (1926), was taken out of his hands, and despite the relative success of
HOTEL IMPERIAL (1927) and THE WOMAN ON TRIAL (1927), two films starring Pola
Negri, his Hollywood sojourn was an overall disappointment. He was credited as director for
THE STREET OF SIN (1928), but the film was actually completed by scenarist Josef von
Sternberg. Suffering from acute rheumatism, Stiller returned to Sweden, where he died at age
45.
1912

THE BLACK MASKS/DE SVARTA MASKERNA

director, screenwriter

1912

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER

director, screenwriter, performer

1912

THE TYRANNICAL FIANCÉE

director, screenwriter, performer

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1913

THE CHILD/BARNET

director

1913

THE MODERN SUFFRAGETTE

director, screenwriter

1913

ON THE FATEFUL ROADS OF LIFE

director, screenwriter

1913

THE UNKNOWN WOMAN director, screenwriter

1913

THE VAMPIRE/VAMPYREN

director, screenwriter

1913

WHEN LOVE KILLS/NAR KARLEKEN DODAR director, screenwriter— from

story
1913

WHEN THE ALARM BELL RINGS

director

1914

BECAUSE OF HER LOVE director, screenwriter

1914

BROTHERS director— from story, screenwriter

1914

THE CHAMBERLAIN

director, screenwriter

1914

PEOPLE OF THE BORDER director

1914

THE RED TOWER

director, screenwriter

1914

THE SHOT

director

1914

STORMY PETREL

director

1914

WHEN THE MOTHER-IN-LAW REIGNS director, screenwriter, performer

1915

ACE OF THIEVES

director

1915

THE DAGGER

director

1915

HIS WIFE'S PAST

director

1915

MADAME DE THEBES

director

1915

PLAYMATES

director, screenwriter

1915

WHEN ARTISTS LOVE

director

1916

THE AVENGER

director

1916

THE BALLET PRIMADONNA

director

1916

THE FIGHT FOR HIS HEART

director, screenwriter

1916

LOVE AND JOURNALISM director

1916

THE LUCKY BROOCH

director

1916

THE MINE PILOT

director

1916

THE WINGS director, screenwriter

1917

ALEXANDER THE GREAT director, screenwriter

1917

HIS WEDDING NIGHT

director

1917

THOMAS GRAAL'S BEST FILM/THOMAS GRAALS BASTA FILM

director

1918

THOMAS GRAAL'S FIRST CHILD/THOMAS GRAALS BASTA BARN
director, screenwriter

1919

SIR ARNE'S TREASURE/HERR ARNES PENGAR/THE THREE WHO WERE

DOOMED

director, screenwriter

1919

SONG OF THE SCARLET FLOWER

director

1920

EROTIKON director, screenwriter

1920

THE FISHING VILLAGE

director

1921

THE EXILES director, screenwriter

1921

JOHAN

director, screenwriter

1922

GUNNAR HEDE'S SAGA

director, screenwriter

1924

THE ATONEMENT OF GOSTA BERLING/GÖSTA BERLINGS SAGA/THE

LEGEND OF GOSTA BERLING

director

1926

THE TEMPTRESS

director

1927

HOTEL IMPERIAL director

1927

THE WOMAN ON TRIAL

director

1928

THE STREET OF SIN

director

Victor Sjöström (1879 - 1960)

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One of the most influential forces in the development of the Swedish cinema, Sjöström began
his career as a professional actor in 1896, as a member of Ernst Ahlbom's traveling theater
company. He worked as both an actor and director for a number of Swedish companies during
the next 16 years. In 1911 he formed his own company along with Einar Froberg, and, in
1913, was offered a film contract by Svenksa Bio.
Throughout his career, reviewers of Sjöström's performances seldom failed to mention
his "distinctive, monumental face, as rich and alive as any landscape." Likewise, Sjöström's
films as a director, which he often wrote and starred in, gained their greatest acclaim for
his expressive use of landscape and "natural scenery." Sjöström's first great success came
during the years 1917-1921, which saw his four film adaptations of novels by Swedish Nobel
laureate Selma Lagerlof (three of which he also starred in), and the film that many consider
his directorial masterpiece, THY SOUL SHALL BEAR WITNESS (1920).
Although Sjöström's Swedish films were generally considered too downbeat for American
audiences (a trade magazine warned theater owners that they would have a better time
attending their own funerals than a screening of THY SOUL SHALL BEAR WITNESS),
the enthusiastic reviews they received for "artistic excellence" and "sheer pictorial power"
made Sjöström, along with the likes of Ernst Lubitsch, Erich von Stroheim, and Sjöström's
colleague Mauritz Stiller, a prime candidate for American import.
In 1923, Svensk Filmindustri sent Sjöström on a "study trip to America," retaining the
Scandinavian distribution rights to the films he would direct for Samuel Goldwyn. During
his seven-year residence in Hollywood (1923-1930), "Seastrom," as he was billed in the US,
directed top stars of the day such as Lillian Gish (THE SCARLET LETTER, 1926, THE
WIND, 1928), Greta Garbo (THE DIVINE WOMAN, 1927), Lon Chaney and Edward G.
Robinson. In a 1924 interview, Charlie Chaplin called him "the greatest director in the world."
Sjöström made his reputation as a master of silent films by virtue of his expressive imagery
and minimal use of titles. With the advent of talkies, however, his style of filmmaking
was quickly outdated. He returned to Sweden in 1930 and resumed his career on the stage,
although he continued to appear frequently in the films of other directors, concluding with his
most memorable role, at the age of 78, as Professor Isak Berg in Ingmar Bergman's WILD
STRAWBERRIES (1957)
1912

THE BLACK MASKS/DE SVARTA MASKERNA

performer

1912

THE GARDENER/TRADGARDSMASTAREN

performer

1912

I LIVETS VAR

performer

1912

LADY MARION'S SUMMER FLIRTATION/LADY MARIONS SOMMARFLIRT
director

1912

LAUGHTER AND TEARS/LOJEN OCH TARAR director

1912

MARRAIGE BUREAU/AKTENSKAPSBYRAN

director, screenwriter

1912

A SECRET MARRIAGE/ETT HEMLIGT GIFTERMAL

director

1913

THE CHILD/BARNET

performer

1913

THE CONFLICTS OF LIFE/LIVETS KONFLIKTER

director, performer

1913

FOR SIN KARLEKS SKULL

performer

1913

HALF BREED/HALVBLOD director

1913

MARGARET DAY/INGEBORG HOLM

director, screenwriter

1913

THE MIRACLE/MIRAKLET

director

1913

THE PARSON/PRASTEN

director

1913

THE POACHER/KARLEK STARKARE AN HAT director

1913

THE STRIKE/STREJKEN

director, screenwriter, performer

1913

THE VAMPIRE/VAMPYREN

performer

1913

THE VOICE OF PASSION/BLODETS ROST

director, performer

1913

WHEN LOVE KILLS/NAR KARLEKEN DODAR performer

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1914

CHILDREN OF THE STREETS/GATANS BARN director

1914

DAUGHTER OF THE PEAKS/HOGFJALLETS DOTTERdirector, screenwriter,

performer
1914

DET VAR I MAJ

director, screenwriter

1914

A GOOD GIRL KEEPS HERSELF IN ORDER/BRA FLICKA REDER SIG SJALV
director, screenwriter

1914

GUILT REDEEMED/SONAD SKULD

director, screenwriter

1914

HEARTS THAT MEET/HJARTAN SOM MOTAS director

1914

JUDGE NOT/DOMEN ICKEdirector

1914

ONE OF THE MANY/EN AV DE MANGAdirector, screenwriter

1915

IN THE HOUR OF TRIAL/I PROVNINGENS STUND

director, performer

1915

LANDSHOVDINGENS DOTTRAR director, screenwriter

1915

PREDATORS OF THE SEA/HAVSGAMAR

director

1915

THE PRICE OF BETRAYAL/JUDASPENGAR

director

1915

SHE TRIUMPHS/HON SEGRADE director, screenwriter, performer

1915

THE SHIPS THAT MEET/SKEPP SOM MOTAS director

1915

STICK TO YOUR LAST, SHOEMAKER/SKOMAKARE BLIV VID DIN LAST
director, screenwriter

1916

KISS OF DEATH/DODSKYSSEN director, screenwriter, performer

1916

A MAN THERE WAS/TERJE VIGEN

director, performer

1916

THERESE

director, screenwriter

1917

THE GIRL FROM THE MARSH CROFT/TOSEN FRAN STORMYRTORPET
director, screenwriter

1917

THE OUTLAW AND HIS WIFE/BERG-EJVIND OCH HANS HUSTRU director,

screenwriter, performer
1917

THOMAS GRAAL'S BEST FILM/THOMAS GRAALS BASTA FILM

performer

1918

SONS OF INGMAR/INGMARSSONERNA I & II director, screenwriter, performer

1918

THOMAS GRAAL'S FIRST CHILD/THOMAS GRAALS BASTA BARN
performer

1919

HIS GRACE'S WILL/HANS NADS TESTAMENTE

director, screenwriter

1919

KARIN DAUGHTER OF INGMAR/KARIN INGMARSDOTTER

director,

screenwriter, performer
1919

THE MONASTERY OF SENDOMIR/KLOSTRET I SENDOMIR director,

screenwriter
1920

MASTERMAN

director, performer

1920

THY SOUL SHALL BEAR WITNESS/KORKARLEN

director, screenwriter,

performer
1921

MORTAL CLAY/VEM DOMER

director

1922

FIRE ON BOARD/ELD OMBORD director, screenwriter, performer

1922

THE SURROUNDED HOUSE/DET OMRINGADE HUSET

director,

screenwriter— with Ragnar Hylten-Cavallius, performer
1923

NAME THE MAN

director

1924

HE WHO GETS SLAPPED director, screenwriter

1925

CONFESSIONS OF A QUEEN

director

1925

THE TOWER OF LIES

director

1926

THE SCARLET LETTER

director

1928

THE DIVINE WOMAN

director

1928

THE MASKS OF THE DEVIL

director

1928

THE WIND

director

1930

A LADY TO LOVE director

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1930

THE MARKURELLS OF WADKOPING/MARKURELLS I WADKOPING
director, performer

1934

SYNNOVE SOLBAKKEN

performer

1935

WALPURGIS NIGHT/VALBORGSMASSOAFTON

performer

1937

JOHN ERICSON—THE VICTOR OF HAMPTON ROADS/JOHN ERICSSON—

SEGRAREN VID HAMPTON ROADS

performer

1937

UNDER THE RED ROBE

director

1939

THE OLD MAN'S COMING/GUBBEN KOMMER

performer

1939

TOWARDS NEW TIMES/MOT NYA TIDER

performer

1941

STRIDEN GAR VIDARE

performer

1943

DET BRINNER EN ELD

performer

1943

THE WORD/ORDET performer

1944

KEJSAREN AV PORTUGALLIEN performer

1947

RALLARE

performer

1948

JAG AR MED EDER…

performer

1949

FARLIG VARperformer

1949

TO JOY/TILL GLÄDJE

performer

1950

KVARTETTEN SOM SPRANGDES

performer

1952

HARD KLANG

performer

1952

KARLEK

performer

1955

MANNEN I MORKER

performer

1956

FLYKTINGARNA/LES EVADES

performer

1957

WILD STRAWBERRIES/SMULTRONSTALLET performer


Nordisk
A Danish production company established in 1906 which, prior to WWI, dominated the world
market with its immense output of unpretentious, often sensational, entertainment films.
Known in America as the Great Northern film Company, Nordisk boasted such internationally
popular stars as Asta Nielsen, Valdemar Psilander, and Olaf Fonss. Among its world-famous
directors were Viggo Larsen, August Blom, Urban Gad, Holger Madsen, Robert Dinesen,
and Benjamin Christensen. The company's Copenhagen studio was among the best-equipped
in the world during the early days of cinema. Nordisk is still in business, the oldest film
production company in the world in continuous existence. See also Denmark.

2


Thomas Alva Edison (1847 - 1931)
Dubbed the "Wizard of Menlo Park" during his own lifetime, and considered by some
the "ancestral deity" of General Electric, Edison was a major contributor to the age of
electronics. Renowned for his work on the incandescent light bulb and phonograph, his
ingenuity also touched devices such as the stock ticker, mimeograph machine and telephone
transmitter. Edison's New Jersey labs in Newark, Menlo Park and West Orange were think
tanks extraordinaire, where creative minds worked together on key developments in early
motion picture technology.
Edison had already made a number of significant inventions, primarily in the field of
telegraphic systems, and established himself in West Orange, the third and largest of his
New Jersey laboratories, when he wrote on October 8, 1888, "I am experimenting upon an
instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear." This instrument
was developed by Edison's assistant, amateur photographer W.K.L. Dickson. Dickson

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followed the experiments of European photographers Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard
Muybridge, who had been working with the notion of "persistence of vision"—whereby
a quickly moving series of pictures gives the illusion of movement. Dickson improved
on the European "zoetrope" or "magic lantern," which was constructed of separate glass
plates mounted on a turning cylinder, by using strips of John Carbutt's (and later George
Eastman's) newly invented flexible celluloid film. Rather than Marey's "photographic rifle,"
or Muybridge's closely spaced cameras going off in rapid succession, Dickson devised an
electrically controlled camera called the "Kinetograph." November 1890 saw the production
of Dickson's debut film, MONKEYSHINES, featuring the antics of Fred Ott, another Edison
assistant.
At first, Edison rejected the notion of projected film. Instead, he had Dickson perfect
the "Kinetoscope," a small cabinet with a peephole, suitable for solitary viewing. The first
nickelodeon "parlor," a storefront of ten Kinetoscopes with each viewing costing a nickel,
opened April 14, 1894, at 1155 Broadway, in New York. It was soon followed by others in
major cities in the US and Europe.
Early movies were 60 to 90 second action shorts with titles such as BARBER SHOP,
BARROOM, WRESTLING, HIGHLAND DANCE, TRAPEZE and so on. These were
produced in the West Orange "Black Maria" studio, a black tar-papered building on a pivot
so that it could be turned to follow the path of the sun through its one skylight giving natural
light. "Documentaries" of activities on Valley Road outside the lab were also filmed. Because
he had failed to patent the Kinetoscope properly, however, Edison's developments were much
copied. Although the 1894 prize fight between Mike Leonard and Jack Cushing, fought in
the "Black Maria," proved a financial coup, he did not in general make much profit from his
motion picture devices.
This situation changed in 1895, when Edison joined forces with Thomas Armat, who
was working on a "Vitascope" projector. Projected films, with the potential to reach large
audiences, premiered on April 23, 1896, at Koster and Bial's Music Hall, at 34th and
Broadway, in New York, sharing the bill with vaudeville acts.
Classics such as Edwin S. Porter's THE LIFE OF AN AMERICAN FIREMAN (1903)
and THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY (1903) were filmed at the "Black Maria" before the
construction, in 1905, of a large glass studio in the Bronx, New York. In 1909 Edison, along
with several other fledgling movie producers, formed the Motion Picture Patents Company to
try to impede independent film production. In 1917, however, this monopoly was broken and
Edison retired from the film business.
MGM immortalized "the Wizard" in two 1940 movies, YOUNG TOM EDISON and
EDISON, THE MAN.

Edwin S. Porter (1869 - 1941)
Preeminent figure among early American filmmakers and one of the first to use techniques
such as closeups and intercutting for narrative purposes. Porter was a projectionist, inventor
and entrepreneur before starting work in 1900 for the Edison company, where he was soon
promoted to head of film production. By 1901 he was making multi-shot films such as
THE EXECUTION OF CZOLGOSZ, a drama about the execution of President McKinley's
assassin which juxtaposed documentary footage of the prison with a staged dramatization of
the execution itself.
Porter's first major achievement was THE LIFE OF AN AMERICAN FIREMAN (1902),
usually considered a landmark work thanks to its sophisticated editing techniques. The
film cuts back and forth between the interior and exterior of a burning building in order to
heighten dramatic effect, and is thus frequently cited as the first American use of editing
in order to "drive" a narrative. (An alternative print of the film was recently discovered in

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which the exterior and interior scenes are juxtaposed as two continuous sequences, leading to
speculation that the intercut version may have been a later development.)
Porter is probably best known for THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY (1903), a sophisticated,
12-minute narrative broken up into separate scenes and using camera movement and
continuity editing to advance the story. His last important contribution to film was to give
an unknown actor and playwright named David Wark Griffith his debut role in the 1907
production, RESCUED FROM AN EAGLE'S NEST. Porter formed his own company, Rex
Films, in 1911, but soon afterward went to work for Famous Players. There he directed
several competent but unexceptional features as well as experimenting with various aspects of
the filmic process.
1901

SMASHING A JERSEY MOSQUITO

producer, photography

1901

TRAPEZE DISROBING ACT

producer, photography

1901

WHAT HAPPENED ON 23RD STREET, NYC

photography

1902

THE BURNING OF DURLAND'S RIDING ACADEMY photography

1902

THE LIFE OF AN AMERICAN FIREMAN director

1902

THE MESSENGER BOY'S MISTAKE

director

1903

ELECTROCUTING AN ELEPHANT

photography

1903

THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY

director

1903

RUBE AND MANDY AT CONEY ISLAND

photography

1903

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE TUNNEL

photography

1904

THE EUROPEAN REST-CURE

producer, photography

1904

STRENUOUS LIFE producer, photography

1905

CONEY ISLAND AT NIGHT

photography

1905

THE MILLER'S DAUGHTER

director, photography

1906

GETTING EVIDENCE

producer, photography

1906

THREE AMERICAN BEAUTIES

producer, photography

1907

RESCUED FROM AN EAGLE'S NEST

director

1913

THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO director, screenwriter

1914

A GOOD LITTLE DEVIL

director, photography

1914

TESS OF THE STORM COUNTRY director, photography

1915

BELLA DONNA

director

1915

THE ETERNAL CITY

director

1915

SOLD director

1915

ZAZA director

1916

LYDIA GILMORE

director


Motion Picture Patents Company
A powerful trust founded in 1908 by a group of pioneer film producers and distributors
representing the companies Edison, Vitagraph, Biograph, Kalem, Lubin, Selig, Essanay,
Pathé Exchange, Méliès, and Gaumont. These companies pooled all their patents claims and
formally assigned them to Edison. They then proclaimed that no one was entitled to produce,
distribute, or exhibit films in the United States unless so licensed by their corporation. They
also set a system of fees and royalties to be paid for the use of cameras, projectors, or any
other motion picture equipment covered by their patents. The Patents Company, soon to
become known as the "Edison Trust," established the General Film Company in 1910 to
distribute the films of its member companies only to licensed theaters. Through this concern
the Patents Company launched a campaign of pressure and intimidation, at the end of which
they bought out or drove out of business all but one of the large exchanges in the country. The
sole survivor was headstrong William Fox, who filed a suit against General in the Federal
courts which eventually led to the dissolution of the Patents Company as a trust operating

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in restraint of trade. In another acquisition spree the Patents Company had also taken over
control of most of the large motion picture theaters in the country. Its biggest headache was
the enforcement of its regulations on a growing number of independent producers. Mavericks
like Carl Laemmle engaged in clandestine production, seeking refuge from the long reach
of the New York-based Patents Company in California and Europe. Jeremiah J. Kennedy of
Biograph, the Patent Company's staunchest executive, organized a vast espionage network to
track down rebel producers and conducted frequent raids on their businesses. But there was
too much money to be made in the film business for his disciplinary schemes to succeed.
As a result of Fox's court suits, the government started dissolution hearings against the
Patents Company in 1913. The case dragged on until 1917, when the company was ordered
to "discontinue unlawful acts." By that time both the Patents Company and its subsidiary
General Film Company were no longer much of a factor in the film business. Of all the
production companies that comprised the Patents group, only Vitagraph survived past WWI.

Hollywood
A section of Los Angeles, California, and for many years the center of the American motion
picture and television industries. It was named by a Mrs. Deida Wilcox, the wife of a Kansas
City real estate man, who in 1886 retired with her husband to a huge ranch that stood on
the site. In 1891 they began dividing their land and in 1903 the growing community was
incorporated as a village, retaining the original name of the ranch, Hollywood. In 1910,
Hollywood was annexed to Los Angeles so that it could avail itself of the city's water supply
and sewage system.
In the early days of American cinema, the center of film production was New York City
(Westerns were shot in the wilderness of New Jersey), with some activity taking place in
Chicago and other American cities. Southern California, with its eternal sunshine and variety
of terrain, attracted occasional film production. In 1907, Col. William N. Selig, Edison's chief
rival, moved part of his company from Chicago to Los Angeles, soon to become the first
producer to make films regularly on the West Coast. In 1909 he opened California's first large
motion picture studio, on Los Angeles' Mission Road. But the greatest impetus to the growth
of Hollywood was provided in 1913 by a man named Cecil B. De Mille. Earlier that year he
had entered a partnership with Jesse L. Lasky and glove salesman Samuel Goldfish (later Sam
Goldwyn), forming the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. They purchased the rights to
a Western novel, THE SQUAW MAN, and De Mille and (co-director) Oscar C. Apfel were
dispatched to Flagstaff, Ariz., to do the shooting on location.
Finding the snow-capped Arizona mountains unsuitable for their story, De Mille and Apfel
got back on the train and continued to the end of the line. And that's how they stumbled
upon Hollywood. They found the small town to be peaceful and pastoral, surrounded by
acres of citrus and avocado groves. They converted a large stable into a studio and began
their production, shooting the exteriors in the nearby countryside. Within months, other
producers followed, partly because of the inviting climate but largely to escape the long reach
of the Motion Picture Patents Company, the huge eastern trust that tried to force all small,
independent producers out of the film business. In 1917 the Patents Company was disbanded
by government antitrust action, and Hollywood was well on its way to becoming the movie
capital of America and a cosmopolitan Mecca of a rapidly growing show business industry.
By 1920, thanks to the phenomenal growth of several major studios and the emergence of the
star system, Hollywood was turning out nearly 800 films annually, and its name became a
synonym for luxury, glamour, and illusory magic.
Hollywood remained the world's greatest dream factory through the late '40s, when its
supremacy began to be threatened by a growing tendency of producers and stars to seek tax
shelters by filming abroad. At the same time, the emergence of television as a competitor

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drastically cut into cinema audiences. This and government antitrust action that forced major
studios to divest themselves of their chains of motion picture theaters combined to undermine
the financial basis of many large companies. By the early '60s, the era of independent
production, based on individual packaging, was firmly established. More often than not,
films were being shot away from Hollywood and an increasing number of resident actors and
technicians found themselves out of work.
If it hadn't been for the regular production of TV films, the impact would have been even
greater and perhaps would have knocked Hollywood off the motion picture production map.
Hollywood has no set physical boundaries. Many of the studios are located in other
communities, some many miles away. It has always been and will continue to be a state of
mind, a dream shared by millions, rather than a mere place where movies are made. And that's
probably why it will never die.

3

D.W. Griffith (1875 - 1948)
David Wark Griffith's achievement is two-fold: he developed for Americans a syntax
for expression in the movies, and he showed how the feature film could be a significant
commercial and cultural element of American culture. The first achievement is less
understood but more important than the second.
Griffith did not enter film with a record as a successful artist. He was a failure as a
playwright, with but one of his plays actually produced. But because he approached film with
the attitude that it was a temporary job, he saw it as an opportunity to experiment, to break the
conventions of his era, to develop new means of relating narratives for the screen.
In 1907, when Griffith tried to sell a story to movie producer Edwin S. Porter who signed
him on as an actor instead, American movies all too often consisted of series of scenes
(originally called views) of events usually taken from the popular press or the stage. Static
cameras recorded scenes connected by titles and little else. Four years earlier in THE GREAT
TRAIN ROBBERY, Porter had stumbled onto more eloquent means of expression—shorter
scenes, multiple locations, use of natural landscapes with actors moving through them, even
the close-up—but he declined to develop these techniques. In fact when Griffith played the
lead in Porter's RESCUED FROM AN EAGLE'S NEST (1907), the young actor was so
carelessly filmed that he was obscured by the edge of the frame. Later that year, Griffith got
his chance to direct and he showed an immediate talent for creative use of the frame, as well
as developing rhythmic editing to build dramatic tension. Griffith also sought out younger
performers who were less bound to the broad style of stage acting and more open to the
nuances required for acting for a camera.
From 1907 to 1913, Griffith averaged 21 films a week, most of them for Biograph, using
overlapping schedules and a stock company of actors who rapidly moved from one film to the
next, sometimes in the same day. Griffith paid special attention to his actresses, developing a
number of important women performers, including Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Mary Pickford,
Blanche Sweet and Mae Marsh.
In the midst of this whirlwind of production Griffith was developing new ways of telling
stories that were uniquely suited to film. Editing became as important an element as
cinematography, most notably in his use of cross cutting between parallel story lines. This
offered opportunities to contrast behavior or social circumstance, as in A CORNER IN
WHEAT (1909), or to develop suspense with a rising tempo of action, as in THE LONELY
VILLA (1909). Griffith's collaborators in this adventure of inventing film language included
not only his cameraman, Billy Bitzer, but also the actors themselves, who were encouraged to
suggest mannerisms to enrich their performances.

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At this time, filmmakers in other countries, especially France and Denmark, were making
comparable discoveries about the importance of editing; often their films were shown in the
United States, just as Griffith's Biograph productions were exported to Europe. This ongoing
dialogue has made it nearly impossible to clearly define sources of innovation and influences
which many historians have consigned solely to Griffith.
In 1913 Griffith broke with the Biograph Company when it declined to let him make
feature-length films and the following year he began production on his first feature, THE
BIRTH OF A NATION (1915). Its release brought Griffith enormous acclaim and infamy.
Audiences were dazzled by the film's sweep and epic power, as well as its intimate moments
of pain and joy, but Griffith's embrace of the Ku Klux Klan and his insensitive depiction of
black characters stirred up a storm of controversy. Previously relegated to the status of an
amusement on the fringes of culture, movies were catapulted by Griffith and his film into
social and financial prominence.
Griffith won financial independence with THE BIRTH OF A NATION and almost
immediately moved on to another epic, an elaboration on the notion of parallel historical
developments, which he would present through cross-cutting across time rather than
geography. INTOLERANCE (1916) was a quartet of stories of man's inhumanity to man
which some historians charge was Griffith's compensation for the accusations of racism made
against him after THE BIRTH OF A NATION. Enormously expensive to produce, the film
was nearly as big a box-office flop as BIRTH had been a hit. Its reputation over the years has
in some ways surpassed its predecessor, and its influence is apparent in the works of Carl
Dreyer, Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang and many other directors.
As great an artistic achievement as INTOLERANCE was, it also left Griffith on a permanent
financial treadmill, as he sought to pay off his debts with proceeds from future productions.
From 1916 to 1931, he made over two dozen more features. At least five of these—BROKEN
BLOSSOMS (1919), WAY DOWN EAST (1920), ORPHANS OF THE STORM (1922),
THE WHITE ROSE (1923) and ISN'T LIFE WONDERFUL (1924)—were either commercial
or critical successes, but the financial dividends went to Griffith's creditors or producers. On
one film, THE SORROWS OF SATAN (1926), Griffith's producers inflated the cost of the
production by pressuring Griffith to film material he did not need and then recut the film after
he had completed it. By the end of the silent era, Griffith was saddled with a reputation for
extravagance, which was undeserved, and sentimentality, which was an integral part of his
personality, although a steadily less compelling component of his films.
Griffith made two sound films, the starched and safe ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1930) and
THE STRUGGLE (1931). THE STRUGGLE is a haunting final work, full of melancholy and
dread of alcoholism, but also distinguished by superb sequences photographed on New York
City streets and an inventive use of sound in factory sequences which revealed Griffith still
seeking new ways to narrate stories on film.
Ignored by the industry he played such an important role in creating, Griffith retreated to over
a decade of isolation at Hollywood's Knickerbocker Hotel, where he died in 1948. For years,
the scurrilous content of THE BIRTH OF A NATION and the unabashed sentiment of many
of the other features consigned Griffith to the status of irrelevancy, but in the mid-1960s,
a Griffith revival began, with re-appraisal of his early works and acknowlegements of his
immense contributions.
1907

RESCUED FROM AN EAGLE'S NEST

performer

1908

THE ADVENTURES OF DOLLIE director

1908

AFTER MANY YEARS

director

1908

THE AWFUL MOMENT

director, screenwriter

1908

BALKED AT THE ALTAR director, screenwriter, performer

1908

THE BANDIT'S WATERLOO

director, screenwriter

background image

1908

THE BARBARIAN INGOMAR

director, screenwriter

1908

BEHIND THE SCENES: WHERE ALL IS NOT GOLD THAT GLITTERS
director, screenwriter

1908

BETRAYED BY A HAND PRINT director, screenwriter

1908

THE BLACK VIPER director, performer

1908

A CALAMITOUS ELOPEMENT

director, screenwriter, performer

1908

THE CALL OF THE WILD director

1908

THE CHRISTMAS BURGLARS

director, screenwriter

1908

THE CLUBMAN AND THE TRAMP

director, screenwriter

1908

CONCEALING A BURGLAR

director, screenwriter

1908

THE DEVIL director, screenwriter, performer

1908

THE FATAL HOUR director, screenwriter

1908

FATHER GETS IN THE GAME

director, screenwriter

1908

THE FEUD AND THE TURKEY

director, screenwriter

1908

FOR A WIFE'S HONOR

director, screenwriter

1908

FOR LOVE OF GOLD

director, screenwriter

1908

THE GIRL AND THE OUTLAW

director, screenwriter

1908

THE GREASER'S GAUNTLET

director, screenwriter

1908

THE GUERRILLA

director, screenwriter

1908

HEART OF O YAMA

director, screenwriter, performer

1908

THE HELPING HAND

director, screenwriter

1908

THE INGRATE

director, screenwriter

1908

THE MAN AND THE WOMAN

director, screenwriter

1908

MONEY MAD

director, screenwriter

1908

MR. JONES AT THE BALL director, screenwriter

1908

MRS. JONES ENTERTAINS

director, screenwriter

1908

THE PIRATE'S GOLD

director, screenwriter

1908

THE PLANTER'S WIFE

director, screenwriter

1908

THE RECKONING

director, screenwriter

1908

THE RED GIRL

director, screenwriter

1908

THE REDMAN AND THE CHILD director, screenwriter

1908

ROMANCE OF A JEWESS director, screenwriter

1908

A SMOKED HUSBAND

director, screenwriter

1908

THE SONG OF THE SHIRT director, screenwriter

1908

THE STOLEN JEWELS

director, screenwriter

1908

TAMING OF THE SHREW director, screenwriter

1908

THE TAVERN KEEPER'S DAUGHTER

director

1908

THE TEST OF FRIENDSHIP

director, screenwriter

1908

THE VALET'S WIFE director, screenwriter

1908

THE VAQUERO'S VOW

director, screenwriter

1908

WHERE THE BREAKERS ROAR director, screenwriter

1908

A WOMAN'S WAY director, screenwriter

1908

THE ZULU'S HEART

director, screenwriter

1909

'TIS AN ILL WIND THAT BLOWS NO GOOD

director, screenwriter

1909

1776

director, screenwriter, performer

1909

AND A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM

director, screenwriter

1909

AT THE ALTAR

director, screenwriter, performer

1909

THE AWAKENING director

1909

A BABY'S SHOE

director, screenwriter

1909

THE BETTER WAY director

background image

1909

THE BRAHMA DIAMOND director, screenwriter

1909

THE BROKEN LOCKET

director, screenwriter

1909

A BURGLAR'S MISTAKE director, screenwriter

1909

THE CARDINAL'S CONSPIRACY director

1909

A CHANGE OF HEART

director

1909

THE CHILDREN'S FRIEND director

1909

COMATA, THE SIOUX

director

1909

A CONVICT'S SACRIFICE director, screenwriter

1909

THE CORD OF LIFE director, screenwriter

1909

A CORNER IN WHEAT

director, screenwriter

1909

THE COUNTRY DOCTOR director, screenwriter

1909

THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH director

1909

THE CRIMINAL HYPNOTIST

director, screenwriter

1909

THE CURTAIN POLE

director, screenwriter

1909

THE DEATH DISK director

1909

THE DECEPTION

director

1909

DRIVE FOR A LIFE director, screenwriter

1909

DRUNKARD'S REFORMATION

director, screenwriter

1909

THE EAVESDROPPER

director, screenwriter

1909

EDGAR ALLAN POE

director, screenwriter

1909

ELOPING WITH AUNTY

director, screenwriter

1909

ERADICATING AUNTY

director, screenwriter

1909

THE EXPIATION

director, screenwriter

1909

THE FADED LILIES director, screenwriter

1909

A FAIR EXCHANGE

director

1909

THE FASCINATING MRS. FRANCIS

director, screenwriter

1909

A FOOL'S REVENGE

director, screenwriter

1909

FOOLS OF FATE

director

1909

THE FRENCH DUEL

director, screenwriter

1909

THE FRIEND OF THE FAMILY

director, screenwriter

1909

GETTING EVEN

director, screenwriter

1909

THE GIBSON GODDESS

director, screenwriter

1909

THE GIRLS AND DADDY director, screenwriter, performer

1909

THE GOLDEN LOUIS

director, screenwriter

1909

HER FIRST BISCUITS

director, screenwriter

1909

THE HINDOO DAGGER

director, screenwriter

1909

HIS DUTY

director

1909

HIS LOST LOVE

director, screenwriter

1909

HIS WARD'S LOVE director, screenwriter

1909

HIS WIFE'S MOTHER

director, screenwriter

1909

HIS WIFE'S VISITOR

director, screenwriter

1909

THE HONOR OF THIEVES director, screenwriter

1909

I DID IT, MAMA

director, screenwriter

1909

IN A HEMPEN BAG director, screenwriter

1909

IN LITTLE ITALY

director

1909

IN OLD KENTUCKY

director

1909

IN THE WATCHES OF THE NIGHT

director, screenwriter

1909

IN THE WINDOW RECESS director

1909

THE INDIAN RUNNER'S ROMANCE

director

1909

JEALOUSY AND THE MAN

director, screenwriter

background image

1909

THE JILT

director, screenwriter

1909

JONES AND HIS NEW NEIGHBORS

director, screenwriter

1909

JONES AND THE LADY BOOK AGENT director, screenwriter

1909

JONES' BURGLAR director, screenwriter

1909

THE JONESES HAVE AMATEUR THEATRICALS

director, screenwriter

1909

LADY HELEN'S ESCAPADE

director

1909

LEATHER STOCKING

director

1909

THE LIGHT THAT CAME director, screenwriter

1909

LINES OF WHITE ON A SULLEN SEA

director, screenwriter

1909

THE LITTLE DARLING

director, screenwriter

1909

THE LITTLE TEACHER

director

1909

THE LONELY VILLA

director

1909

LOVE FINDS A WAY

director, screenwriter

1909

LUCKY JIM director

1909

THE LURE OF THE GOWN director, screenwriter

1909

THE MANIAC COOK

director, screenwriter

1909

THE MEDICINE BOTTLE director, screenwriter

1909

THE MENDED LUTE

director

1909

THE MESSAGE

director

1909

MEXICAN SWEETHEARTS

director, screenwriter

1909

A MIDNIGHT ADVENTURE

director, screenwriter

1909

THE MILLS OF THE GODS director, screenwriter

1909

THE MOUNTAINEER'S HONOR

director, screenwriter

1909

MR. JONES HAS A CARD PARTY director, screenwriter

1909

MRS. JONES' LOVER

director, screenwriter

1909

THE NECKLACE

director

1909

A NEW TRICK

director, screenwriter

1909

THE NOTE IN THE SHOE director, screenwriter

1909

NURSING A VIPER director, screenwriter

1909

OH, UNCLE! director, screenwriter

1909

ONE BUSY HOUR

director, screenwriter

1909

ONE TOUCH OF NATURE director

1909

THE OPEN GATE

director, screenwriter

1909

THE PEACHBASKET HAT director, screenwriter

1909

PIPPA PASSES

director, screenwriter

1909

THE POLITICIAN'S LOVE STORYdirector, screenwriter

1909

PRANKS

director

1909

THE PRUSSIAN SPY

director, screenwriter

1909

THE REDMAN'S VIEW

director

1909

THE RENUNCIATION

director, screenwriter

1909

THE RESTORATION

director, screenwriter

1909

RESURRECTION

director

1909

THE ROAD TO THE HEART

director, screenwriter

1909

THE ROCKY ROAD director

1909

ROUE'S HEART

director, screenwriter

1909

THE RUDE HOSTESS

director, screenwriter

1909

A RURAL ELOPEMENT

director, screenwriter

1909

THE SACRIFICE

director, screenwriter

1909

THE SALVATION ARMY LASS

director, screenwriter

1909

SCHNEIDER'S ANTI-NOISE CRUSADE director, screenwriter

background image

1909

SEALED ROOM

director

1909

THE SEVENTH DAY

director, screenwriter

1909

THE SLAVE director, screenwriter

1909

THE SON'S RETURN

director, screenwriter

1909

A SOUND SLEEPER director, screenwriter

1909

A STRANGE MEETING

director, screenwriter

1909

THE SUICIDE CLUB

director

1909

SWEET AND TWENTY

director

1909

SWEET REVENGE director, screenwriter

1909

TENDER HEARTS

director, screenwriter

1909

THE TEST

director, screenwriter

1909

THEY WOULD ELOPE

director

1909

THOSE AWFUL HATS

director, screenwriter

1909

THOSE BOYS!

director, screenwriter

1909

THROUGH THE BREAKERS

director

1909

TO SAVE HER SOUL

director, screenwriter

1909

TRAGIC LOVE

director, screenwriter

1909

A TRAP FOR SANTA CLAUS

director, screenwriter

1909

THE TRICK THAT FAILED director

1909

A TROUBLESOME SATCHEL

director

1909

TRYING TO GET ARRESTED

director, screenwriter

1909

TWIN BROTHERS

director

1909

TWO MEMORIES

director, screenwriter

1909

TWO WOMEN AND A MAN

director, screenwriter

1909

THE VIOLIN MAKER OF CREMONA

director

1909

THE VOICE OF THE VIOLIN

director, screenwriter

1909

WANTED: A CHILD director, screenwriter

1909

WAS JUSTICE SERVED?

director, screenwriter

1909

THE WAY OF MAN director, screenwriter

1909

THE WELCOME BURGLAR

director, screenwriter

1909

WHAT DRINK DID director, screenwriter

1909

WHAT'S YOUR HURRY?

director, screenwriter

1909

THE WINNING COAT

director, screenwriter

1909

WITH HER CARD

director, screenwriter

1909

THE WOODEN LEG director, screenwriter

1909

A WREATH IN TIME

director, screenwriter

1910

AN ARCADIAN MAID

director

1910

AS IT IS IN LIFE

director

1910

AS THE BELLS RANG OUT

director

1910

THE BANKER'S DAUGHTERS

director

1910

THE BROKEN DOLL

director

1910

THE CALL

director, screenwriter

1910

THE CALL TO ARMS

director

1910

A CHILD OF THE GHETTOdirector

1910

A CHILD'S FAITH

director

1910

A CHILD'S IMPULSE

director

1910

A CHILD'S STRATAGEM director

1910

THE CHINK AT GOLDEN GULCHdirector

1910

CHOOSING A HUSBAND director, screenwriter

1910

THE CLOISTER'S TOUCH director

background image

1910

THE CONVERTS

director

1910

THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE

director

1910

THE DANCING GIRL OF BUTTE director, screenwriter

1910

THE DUKE'S PLAN director, screenwriter

1910

THE ENGLISHMAN AND THE GIRL

director, screenwriter

1910

EXAMINATION DAY AT SCHOOL

director

1910

THE FACE AT THE WINDOW

director

1910

FAITHFUL

director

1910

THE FINAL SETTLEMENT director

1910

A FLASH OF LIGHTdirector

1910

THE FUGITIVE

director

1910

GOLD IS NOT ALL director

1910

A GOLD NECKLACE

director

1910

THE GOLD SEEKERS

director

1910

THE GOLDEN SUPPER

director

1910

HER FATHER'S PRIDE

director

1910

HER TERRIBLE ORDEAL director, screenwriter

1910

HIS LAST BURGLARY

director

1910

HIS LAST DOLLAR director

1910

HIS SISTER-IN-LAW

director

1910

THE HONOR OF HIS FAMILY

director

1910

THE HOUSE WITH CLOSED SHUTTERS director

1910

THE ICONOCLAST director

1910

THE IMPALEMENT director

1910

IN LIFE'S CYCLE

director

1910

IN OLD CALIFORNIA

director

1910

IN THE BORDER STATES director

1910

IN THE SEASON OF THE BUDS

director

1910

A KNOT IN THE PLOT

director

1910

THE LAST DEAL

director, screenwriter

1910

THE LESSONdirector

1910

LITTLE ANGELS OF LUCK

director

1910

LOVE AMONG THE ROSES

director

1910

THE MAN

director

1910

THE MARKED TIME-TABLE

director

1910

MAY AND DECEMBER

director

1910

THE MESSAGE OF THE VIOLIN director, screenwriter

1910

A MIDNIGHT CUPID

director

1910

A MOHAWK'S WAY

director

1910

MUGSY BECOMES A HERO

director

1910

MUGSY'S FIRST SWEETHEART director

1910

NEVER AGAIN

director, screenwriter

1910

THE NEWLYWEDS director, screenwriter

1910

NOT SO BAD AS HE SEEMED

director

1910

THE OATH AND THE MAN

director

1910

ON THE REEF

director, screenwriter

1910

ONE NIGHT AND THEN

director, screenwriter

1910

OVER SILENT PATHS

director

1910

A PLAIN SONG

director

1910

THE PURGATION

director

background image

1910

RAMONA

director, screenwriter

1910

A RICH REVENGE director

1910

A ROMANCE OF THE WESTERN HILLS director

1910

ROSE O' SALEM TOWN

director

1910

SERIOUS SIXTEEN director

1910

SIMPLE CHARITY director

1910

THE SMOKER

director

1910

THE SONG OF THE WILDWOOD FLUTEdirector

1910

THE SORROWS OF THE UNFAITHFUL director

1910

A SUMMER IDYLL director

1910

A SUMMER TRAGEDY

director

1910

SUNSHINE SUE

director

1910

TAMING A HUSBAND

director

1910

THOU SHALT NOT director

1910

THE THREAD OF DESTINY

director, story

1910

THE TWISTED TRAIL

director

1910

THE TWO BROTHERS

director

1910

TWO LITTLE WAIFS: A MODERN FAIRY TALE

director

1910

THE UNCHANGING SEA director, screenwriter

1910

UNEXPECTED HELP

director

1910

THE USURER

director, screenwriter

1910

A VICTIM OF JEALOUSY director

1910

WAITER NO. 5

director

1910

THE WAY OF THE WORLD

director

1910

WHAT THE DAISY SAID

director

1910

WHEN WE WERE IN OUR TEENS director

1910

WHITE ROSES

director

1910

WILFUL PEGGY

director

1910

WINNING BACK HIS LOVE

director

1910

THE WOMAN FROM MELLON'S director, screenwriter

1911

THE ADVENTURES OF BILLY

director, performer

1911

AS IN A LOOKING GLASS director

1911

THE BATTLE

director

1911

THE BLIND PRINCESS AND THE POET director

1911

BOBBY THE COWARD

director

1911

THE BROKEN CROSS

director

1911

THE CHIEF'S DAUGHTER director

1911

CONSCIENCE

director

1911

A COUNTRY CUPID

director

1911

DAN, THE DADDY director

1911

A DECREE OF DESTINY

director

1911

THE DIAMOND STAR

director

1911

ENOCH ARDEN

director

1911

THE FAILURE

director

1911

FATE'S TURNING

director

1911

FIGHTING BLOOD director

1911

FISHER FOLKS

director

1911

FOR HIS SON

director

1911

THE HEART OF A SAVAGE

director

1911

HEARTBEATS OF LONG AGO

director

background image

1911

HER AWAKENING director

1911

HER SACRIFICE

director

1911

HIS DAUGHTER

director

1911

HIS MOTHER'S SCARF

director

1911

HIS TRUST

director

1911

HIS TRUST FULFILLED

director

1911

HOW SHE TRIUMPHED

director

1911

IN THE DAYS OF '49

director

1911

THE INDIAN BROTHERS director

1911

THE ITALIAN BARBER

director, screenwriter

1911

ITALIAN BLOOD

director

1911

A KNIGHT OF THE ROAD director

1911

THE LAST DROP OF WATER

director

1911

THE LILY OF THE TENEMENTS director

1911

THE LONEDALE OPERATOR

director

1911

THE LONG ROAD

director

1911

LOVE IN THE HILLS

director

1911

MADAME HEX

director

1911

THE MAKING OF A MAN director

1911

THE MISER'S HEART

director

1911

THE NEW DRESS

director

1911

THE OLD BOOKKEEPER director

1911

THE OLD CONFECTIONER'S MISTAKE director

1911

OUT FROM THE SHADOWdirector

1911

PARADISE LOST

director

1911

THE POOR SICK MEN

director

1911

THE PRIMAL CALL director

1911

THE REVENUE MAN AND THE GIRL

director

1911

A ROMANY TRAGEDY

director

1911

THE ROSE OF KENTUCKY

director

1911

THE RULING PASSION

director

1911

SAVED FROM HIMSELF

director

1911

A SMILE OF A CHILD

director

1911

A SORROWFUL EXAMPLE

director

1911

THE SPANISH GYPSY

director

1911

THE SQUAW'S LOVE

director

1911

SUNSHINE THROUGH THE DARK

director

1911

SWORDS AND HEARTS

director

1911

A TERRIBLE DISCOVERY director

1911

THE THIEF AND THE GIRL

director

1911

THREE SISTERS

director

1911

THROUGH DARKENED VALES director

1911

THE TRAIL OF BOOKS

director

1911

THE TWO PATHS

director

1911

THE TWO SIDES

director

1911

THE UNVEILING

director

1911

THE VOICE OF THE CHILD

director

1911

WAS HE A COWARD?

director

1911

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUR OLD?director

1911

WHEN A MAN LOVES

director

background image

1911

THE WHITE ROSE OF THE WILDE

director

1911

A WOMAN SCORNED

director

1912

THE BURGLAR'S DILEMMA

director

1912

A CRY FOR HELP

director

1912

THE ETERNAL MOTHER director, screenwriter

1912

IN THE AISLES OF THE WILD

director

1912

THE INFORMER

director

1912

THE MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY

director

1912

MY HERO

director

1912

THE NEW YORK HAT

director

1912

THE OLD ACTOR

director

1912

ONE IS BUSINESS, THE OTHER CRIME director

1912

THE ONE SHE LOVED

director

1912

A TALE OF THE WILDERNESS

director

1912

THE TELEPHONE GIRL AND THE LADY

director

1912

TWO DAUGHTERS OF EVE

director

1912

AN UNSEEN ENEMY

director

1913

THE BATTLE AT ELDERBUSH GULCH director

1913

DURING THE ROUND UP director

1913

HER MOTHER'S OATH

director

1913

THE HOUSE OF DARKNESS

director

1913

JUDITH OF BETHULIA

director

1913

JUST GOLD director

1913

JUST KIDS

director

1913

THE LADY AND THE MOUSE

director

1913

THE LEFT-HANDED MAN director

1913

THE MADONNA OF THE STORM director

1913

THE MISTAKE

director

1913

A MISUNDERSTOOD BOY director

1913

A MODEST HERO

director

1913

THE MOTHERING HEART director

1913

OIL AND WATER

director

1913

THE PERFIDY OF MARY director

1913

SO RUNS THE WAY

director

1913

A TIMELY INTERCEPTION

director

1913

THE UNWELCOME GUEST

director

1913

A WOMAN IN THE ULTIMATE

director

1914

THE AVENGING CONSCIENCE

director, screenwriter

1914

THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES

director, screenwriter

1914

THE ESCAPEdirector, screenwriter

1914

HOME, SWEET HOME

director, screenwriter

1915

THE BIRTH OF A NATION producer, director, screenwriter, composer

1915

ENOCH ARDEN

performer

1915

JORDAN IS A HARD ROAD

producer

1915

THE LAMB

director

1915

THE LILY AND THE ROSE director

1916

BETTY OF GREYSTONE

producer

1916

DAPHNE AND THE PIRATE

screenwriter

1916

FIFTY-FIFTY producer

1916

THE GOOD BAD MAN

producer

background image

1916

THE HABIT OF HAPPINESS

producer

1916

HOODOO ANN

screenwriter

1916

AN INNOCENT MAGDALENE

producer, story

1916

INTOLERANCE

director, screenwriter, composer

1916

LET KATIE DO IT

director

1916

MANHATTAN MADNESS producer

1916

THE MISSING LINKS

director

1918

THE GREAT LOVE producer, director

1918

THE GREATEST THING IN LIFE producer, director

1918

HEARTS OF THE WORLD producer, director, screenwriter— English translation,

music, music arrangement
1918

THE HUN WITHIN screenwriter

1919

BROKEN BLOSSOMS

producer, director

1919

THE GIRL WHO STAYED AT HOME

producer, director

1919

THE GREATEST QUESTION

director

1919

A ROMANCE OF HAPPY VALLEY

producer, director, screenwriter

1919

SCARLET DAYS

producer, director

1919

TRUE HEART SUSIE

producer, director

1920

THE IDOL DANCERdirector

1920

THE LOVE FLOWER

director, screenwriter

1920

WAY DOWN EAST producer, director, screenwriter

1921

DREAM STREET

director, screenwriter

1922

ONE EXCITING NIGHT

producer, director, screenwriter, story

1922

ORPHANS OF THE STORM

producer, director

1923

THE WHITE ROSE director, screenwriter, story

1924

AMERICA

producer, director

1924

ISN'T LIFE WONDERFUL? producer, director, screenwriter

1925

SALLY OF THE SAWDUST

producer, director

1925

THAT ROYLE GIRL producer, director

1926

THE SORROWS OF SATAN

director

1928

THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES

director

1928

DRUMS OF LOVE

producer, director

1929

LADY OF THE PAVEMENTS

director

1930

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

director

1931

THE STRUGGLE

director, screenwriter

1936

SAN FRANCISCO

director

1939

ONE MILLION B.C. director

4

Mack Sennett (1880 - 1960)
Mack Sennett was often known by his self-endowed title "The King of Comedy." In truth,
Sennett was not so much a king as a ringmaster for a motley menagerie of other-worldy
grotesques that slipped, slid and slapped their way at breakneck speeds across American
movie screens of the 1910s. The anarchic world of cross-eyed rubes, nightmare-bearded
villains, pulchritudinous bathing beauties and bumbling cops falling off cliffs, out of
buildings, and into and out of cars was the quite unexpected creation of a gentleman whose
first ambition in life was to be an opera star.
Born in Canada, Sennett moved with his family at the age of 17 to Connecticut. An encounter
with fellow Canadian Marie Dressler led to an introduction to producer David Belasco and
a new career for young Sennett on the vaudeville stage. In New York, he met the formidable

background image

film producer-director D.W. Griffith, for whom he played a bevy of roles, including the lead
in THE CURTAIN POLE (1909), Griffith's only directorial attempt at a comedy. Sennett
stumbled into directing by accident: when a director fell ill at the last minute, he was told to
replace him. Griffith then assigned Sennett to supervise production of his comedy unit and,
by 1912, Sennett had set up his own studio in Hollywood and had become America's self-
appointed comic showman—"a producer of laughs."
And a producer he was. Sennett's Keystone operation became a California version of Henry
Ford's automobile plant in Michigan. Comedies were cranked out at bracing, production-line
speed, with several produced in one day from an outline prepared under Sennett's supervision.
The formula was unrepentently drawn from French models; as Sennett put it, "I stole my first
ideas from the Pathés."
In spite of the appearance of frenzied freedom in Sennett's slapstick orgies, the formula was
in fact strict and unbending. Characterization was eschewed in favor of stereotypes with
whom the audience could make an immediate identification. Sennett also issued strict rules
governing the type of gags that could be used; in fact, he declared, there were only two real
categories of gags: "the fall of dignity and the mistaken identity."
The roster of Sennett talent was impressive. At one point Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson,
Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Harry Langdon, Harold Lloyd, Raymond Griffith and Frank
Capra worked for Sennett. But, for an innovator, Keystone was a graveyard, and any comic
talent with ideas bolted at the first opportunity.
Sennett, however, refused to change and clung to his threadbare formula through the 1920s
and into the 30s, churning out tired, low-budget variations of his successes of the teens. He
had, nevertheless, created the ground rules for American screen comedy. Among the pratfalls,
chases, stereotypes and pantomime, Sennett set the tone and composed the basic melody. It
was left to other, more inspired artists, to pick up that tune and transform it into a symphony.
1908

THE BLACK VIPER performer

1909

THE CURTAIN POLE

performer

1912

THE WATER NYMPH

producer, director, performer

1914

A FILM JOHNNIE

director

1914

MABEL AT THE WHEEL

director

1914

MABEL'S STRANGE PREDICAMENT

director

1914

TANGO TANGLES director

1914

TILLIE'S PUNCTURED ROMANCE

director

1921

HOME TALENT

producer, director

1921

MOLLY O'

story

1921

A SMALL TOWN IDOL

screenwriter

1922

THE CROSSROADS OF NEW YORK

screenwriter, story

1922

OH, MABEL BEHAVE

director, performer

1923

THE EXTRA GIRL story

1923

THE SHRIEK OF ARABY

producer, story

1923

SUZANNA

screenwriter

1928

THE GOODBYE KISS

director, screenwriter

1928

THE OLD BARN

director

1930

MIDNIGHT DADDIES

producer, director

1931

I SURRENDER DEAR

director

1931

THE LOUD MOUTH producer

1931

ONE MORE CHANCE

director

1931

WRESTLING SWORDFISH producer

1932

HYPNOTIZED

director, screenwriter, story

1935

THE TIMID YOUNG MAN director

background image

1939

HOLLYWOOD CAVALCADE

performer

1949

DOWN MEMORY LANE

performer

1955

ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET THE KEYSTONE KOPS

performer


Harold Lloyd (1893 - 1971)
Harold Lloyd brought a journeyman's precision and a craftsman's expertise to American
comedy at a time when its style was rapidly headed towards the idiosyncratic. In the process,
Lloyd created a bespectacled comic Everyman that tapped the pulse of flashy and brash 1920s
America, making Lloyd one of the richest and most popular comic performers of that era.
In high school, Lloyd gave vent to his competitive energies as a boxer and debator, but the
theater bug hit him and, after graduating, he obtained an acting spot in a traveling repertory
company. When the company closed in Los Angeles, Lloyd began to make the rounds of the
movie studios, seeking out a living as a movie extra. Another extra trying to scrape together a
living was Hal Roach and the two became friends. When Roach inherited money and decided
to make his own films, Lloyd went to work for him. Together they created the character of
Willie Work in several shorts made from 1913 to 1915, but only the last one, JUST NUTS,
found its way to theatrical distribution. On the basis of that film, Mack Sennett hired Lloyd,
but, after an unsuccessful year at Keystone, Lloyd came back to Roach, where he created
another character, Lonesome Luke. With Luke, Lloyd joined the legion of Charlie Chaplin
imitators so popular at the time. Restless and unhappy with this less-than-original creation,
Lloyd was trapped by its success, and the film exchanges were reluctant to allow him to try
something different. However, Lloyd was determined to find a new character, even if it meant
forsaking his newfound success.
After seeing a play featuring a fighting priest who wore horn-rimmed glasses, Lloyd
experimented with the concept of a more realistic looking character who also wore glasses,
not an outsider (as Chaplin's tramp was), but rather a working member of society. Lloyd
featured his new character in a series of shorts, starting with OVER THE FENCE (1917),
reducing his output from two-reelers to one-reelers to insure exposure of his new character in
a new film once a week instead of twice a month. But it wasn't until THE CITY SLICKER
(1918) that Lloyd finally developed the formula for this bespectacled character, a brash
young go-getter whose single-mindededness leads him to succeed and get the girl by the
story's end. In fact, what Lloyd had done was adapt the Douglas Fairbanks persona from
the 1910s to his own talents, converting Fairbanks's aristocrat to a clean-cut Horatio Alger-
type from the middle class. Lloyd's early films with this character were nothing more than
remakes of old Fairbanks comedies: GRANDMA'S BOY (1922) is a remade version of THE
MOLLYCODDLE (1920); DOCTOR JACK (1922) is a remake of DOWN TO EARTH
(1917); WHY WORRY? (1923) another version of HIS MAJESTY THE AMERICAN
(1919). But in adapting the Fairbanks type to the middle class, Lloyd had hit on a national
archetype, a character who celebrated the 20s boom and consumer consumption. There was
no criticism of the social structure—in fact, according to Lloyd, the character reveled in
it: "I think my character represented the white-collar middle class that felt frustrated but was
always fighting to overcome its shortcomings. We had a big appeal for businessman."
A more realistic comic character emerged, giving rise to a more realistic comedy style which
linked the energy and movement of the character clowns with the psychological realism of
the dramatic tradition. Since the character was not essentially funny in himself, jokes had to
be constructed around him, the gags more tightly controlled and used to propel the storyline.
Each gag followed the next in a logical progression until the film's climactic vindication and
triumph of the Lloyd hero.
Building the gags into a narrative line made it much easier for Lloyd to expand into feature
production. Throughout the 20s Lloyd was a box-office draw, from A SAILOR-MADE

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MAN (1921) to SPEEDY (1928). His steady output—two features a year—kept his public
happy with such pictures as GRANDMA'S BOY (1922), SAFETY LAST (1923), THE
FRESHMAN (1925), and THE KID BROTHER (1927). But after the 1929 stock market
crash, Lloyd's character became obsolete, his brashness coming off as abrasive.
And just as Lloyd had reworked the type from Fairbanks, the type was reworked again,
transformed into the success-at-any-price gangsters of Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson and
James Cagney. The sociable character with glasses had become a murderous sociopath. By
the late 1930s, Lloyd's character had become merely wholesome and Newsweek noted that
Lloyd was "the leading representative of 100 per cent American purity." After PROFESSOR
BEWARE (1938), Lloyd left films, only to resurface ten years later in an aborted comeback,
THE SIN OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK/MAD WEDNESDAY, a subversion of his 20s
persona to fit the doom-laden 40s, a film that one critic called "a slapstick equivalent of
DEATH OF A SALESMAN."
Although Lloyd's films seem mechanical today, he made important contributions, with
detailed gag constructions and dramatic structure integrated with slapstick, to leave a lasting
mark on the film comedy landscape.
1913

FROM ITALY'S SHORES

performer

1914

HIS HEART, HIS HAND AND HIS SWORD

performer

1914

SAMSON

performer

1914

WILLIE

performer

1915

A FOOZLE AT THE TEA PARTY performer

1915

INTO THE LIGHT

performer

1915

JUST NUTS performer

1915

MISS FATTY'S SEASIDE LOVERS

performer

1916

LONESOME LUKE LEANS TO THE LITERARY performer

1916

LUKE LUGS LUGGAGE

performer

1917

BLISS performer

1917

BY THE SAD SEA WAVES performer

1917

THE FLIRT

performer

1917

LUKE'S BUSY DAY performer

1917

LUKE'S LOST LIBERTY

performer

1917

OVER THE FENCE performer

1917

PINCHED

performer

1917

RAINBOW ISLAND performer

1918

THE BIG IDEA

performer

1918

THE CITY SLICKERperformer

1918

IT'S A WILD LIFE

performer

1918

ON THE JUMP

performer

1918

PIPE THE WHISKERS

performer

1918

SPRING FEVER

performer

1919

BUMPING INTO BROADWAY

performer

1919

CAPTAIN KIDD'S KIDS

performer

1919

FROM HAND TO MOUTH performer

1919

HIS ROYAL SLYNESS

performer

1920

AN EASTERN WESTERNER

performer

1920

GET OUT AND GET UNDER

performer

1920

HAUNTED SPOOKSperformer

1920

HIGH AND DIZZY performer

1920

NUMBER, PLEASE performer

1921

AMONG THOSE PRESENT performer

background image

1921

BE MY WIFE performer

1921

I DO

performer

1921

NEVER WEAKEN

performer

1921

NOW OR NEVER

performer

1921

A SAILOR-MADE MAN

performer

1922

BACK TO THE WOODS

performer

1922

DOCTOR JACK

performer

1922

GRANDMA'S BOY performer

1923

SAFETY LAST

screenwriter, performer

1923

WHY WORRY?

performer

1924

GIRL SHY

performer

1924

HOT WATER performer

1925

THE FRESHMAN

performer

1926

FOR HEAVEN'S SAKE

performer

1927

THE KID BROTHER performer

1928

SPEEDY

performer

1929

WELCOME DANGER

producer, performer

1930

FEET FIRST performer

1932

MOVIE CRAZY

producer, performer

1934

THE CAT'S PAW

producer, performer

1936

THE MILKY WAY performer

1938

PROFESSOR BEWARE

producer, performer

1941

A GIRL, A GUY, AND A GOB

producer

1942

MY FAVORITE SPY producer

1947

THE SIN OF HAROLD DIDDLEBOCK/MAD WEDNESDAY

performer

1962

HAROLD LLOYD'S WORLD OF COMEDY

footage compiler, performer



Buster Keaton (1895 - 1966)
Buster Keaton's films enjoyed only moderate commercial success at the time of their release;
it is with the passage of time that their subtle riches have been fully appreciated. Keaton's
public signature was his stone face, which seemed never to betray his feelings. But this
impassivity was belied by his body, a dynamo of movement and acrobatic grace that carried
Buster through many a hostile situation. Trains, automobiles, hot air balloons, houses of all
kinds (haunted, electric and build-it-yourself), ocean liners, river boats, row boats, herds of
cattle, squads of police, armies of women—even the mechanism of cinema itself—all imperil
Keaton as he seeks love, the promise of wealth or the comfort of his family. Unlike Fatty
Arbuckle, the comedian who gave Keaton his start in films and who took savage glee in
delivering vengeance to the pompous, Keaton sought a measure of serenity in a world where
peace is hard to find.
Keaton set up his "style" of comedy in ONE WEEK (1920), a short about a man trying to
assemble a build-it-yourself house. In collaboration with Eddie Cline as scenarist and director,
Keaton followed with the surreal NEIGHBORS (1920) and THE BOAT (1921), to cite
two highlights from a prolific period. THE BALOONATIC (1923) and THE LOVE NEST
(1923) were next, and then he and producer Joseph M. Schenck (who was married to Norma
Talmadge, sister of Keaton's wife, Natalie) expanded their horizons with the feature THE
THREE AGES (1923). Thereafter Keaton devoted his primary attention to feature films,
directing by himself.
Within 18 months, he came out with OUR HOSPITALITY (1923), SHERLOCK, JR. (1924)
and THE NAVIGATOR (1924), a string of first features almost unmatched in film history.

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SHERLOCK, JR. involves a projectionist stepping into and out of the movies he casts upon
the screen, becoming subject to the plastic worlds of space and time that Keaton so deftly
manipulated in all of his films. A sure sense of what was appropriate and possible on film
is what ultimately animates his films for later generations. A few examples from SEVEN
CHANCES (1925): Keaton wants to show the passage of time, so we see a montage of a
puppy growing to become a huge dog; to move his character across town in an automobile,
Keaton has him enter the car, dissolves the background to the new location, and the
character promptly exits, a new form of shorthand uniquely appropriate to the movies, one
that is thoroughly artificial, anything but realistic, but works consistently because Keaton
uses his film audience as an "accomplice," and we appreciate it. Keaton took delight in
exploring the properties of the medium as in SEVEN CHANCES, a silent film in which his
character is trying to propose to a woman on a golf course; she is unable to "hear" what we
have "seen" (thanks to the titles), and a crowd gathers around him, listening to the words we
cannot "hear!"
Keaton continued for several years to make works of this high caliber, including his
masterpiece, THE GENERAL (1927), a Civil War romance. But his career came undone
when Schenck persuaded him to abandon his own studio and join MGM. From 1928 on,
Keaton's ability to improvise and develop his narratives was compromised by the studio
production system, which eventually rejected him. Abandoned by his wife, retreating to
alcohol, Keaton was reduced to work as a gag man and to bit parts until a 1962 retrospective
at Paris' Cinémathčque Française sparked a revival of interest in his early films.
In 1965, he acted in two notable short films, FILM, from a screenplay by Samuel Beckett,
and THE RAILRODDER; that September, he appeared at the Venice Film Festival to a
tumultuous reception. Keaton's art and life were splendidly taken up by Kevin Brownlow and
David Gill in their TV documentary series, "Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow" (1987).
1917

THE BUTCHER BOY

performer

1917

CONEY ISLAND

performer

1917

A COUNTRY HERO performer

1917

HIS WEDDING NIGHT

performer

1917

OH, DOCTOR!

performer

1917

A RECKLESS ROMEO

performer

1917

THE ROUGH HOUSE

performer

1918

THE BELL BOY

performer

1918

THE COOK

performer

1918

GOOD NIGHT NURSE

performer

1918

MOONSHINE

performer

1918

OUT WEST

performer

1919

BACK STAGE

performer

1919

THE GARAGE

performer

1919

THE HAYSEED

performer

1919

LOVE performer

1919

THE ROUND UP

performer

1920

CONVICT 13 director, screenwriter, performer

1920

NEIGHBORS director, screenwriter

1920

ONE WEEK director, screenwriter, performer

1920

THE SCARECROW director, screenwriter, performer

1921

THE BOAT

director, screenwriter, performer

1921

THE GOAT

director, screenwriter, performer

1921

HARD LUCK director, screenwriter, performer

1921

THE HAUNTED HOUSE

director, screenwriter, performer

background image

1921

THE HIGH SIGN

director, screenwriter, performer

1921

THE PALEFACE

director, screenwriter, performer

1921

THE PLAYHOUSE director, screenwriter, performer

1921

THE SAPHEAD

producer, performer

1922

THE BLACKSMITH director, screenwriter, performer

1922

COPS director, screenwriter, performer

1922

DAY DREAMS

director, screenwriter, performer

1922

THE ELECTRIC HOUSE

director, screenwriter, performer

1922

THE FROZEN NORTH

director, screenwriter, performer

1922

MY WIFE'S RELATIONS

director, screenwriter, performer

1923

THE BALLOONATIC

director, screenwriter, performer

1923

THE LOVE NEST

director, screenwriter, performer

1923

OUR HOSPITALITY director, performer

1923

THE THREE AGES director, screenwriter, performer

1924

THE NAVIGATOR performer

1924

SHERLOCK, JR.

director, performer

1925

GO WEST

director, story, performer

1925

SEVEN CHANCES director, performer

1926

BATTLING BUTLER

director, performer

1927

COLLEGE

performer

1927

THE GENERAL

director, story, performer

1928

THE CAMERAMAN producer, performer

1928

STEAMBOAT BILL, JR.

producer, performer

1929

THE HOLLYWOOD REVUE OF 1929

performer

1929

SPITE MARRIAGE producer, performer

1930

DOUGHBOYS

producer, performer

1930

FREE AND EASY/EASY GO

performer

1931

PARLOR, BEDROOM AND BATH producer, performer

1931

SIDEWALKS OF NEW YORK

producer, performer

1931

SPLASH

director

1932

THE PASSIONATE PLUMBER

producer, performer

1932

SPEAK EASILY

performer

1933

WHAT! NO BEER? performer

1934

ALLEZ OOP performer

1934

THE GOLD GHOST performer

1934

LE ROI DES CHAMPS-ELYSÉES performer

1935

THE E-FLAT MAN performer

1935

HAYSEED ROMANCE

performer

1935

ONE-RUN ELMER performer

1935

PALOOKA FROM PADUCAH

performer

1935

TARS AND STRIPES

performer

1935

THE TIMID YOUNG MAN performer

1936

BLUE BLAZES

performer

1936

THE CHEMIST

performer

1936

GRAND SLAM OPERA

performer

1936

JAIL BAIT

performer

1936

LA FIESTA DE SANTA BARBARA

performer

1936

MIXED MAGIC

performer

1936

AN OLD SPANISH CUSTOM/THE INVADER

performer

1936

THREE ON A LIMB performer

background image

1937

DITTOperformer

1937

LOVE NEST ON WHEELS performer

1938

HOLLYWOOD HANDICAPdirector

1938

LIFE IN SOMETOWN, USAdirector

1938

LOVE FINDS ANDY HARDY

director

1938

STREAMLINED SWING

director

1938

TOO HOT TO HANDLE

director

1939

AT THE CIRCUS/MARX BROTHERS AT THE CIRCUS director

1939

HOLLYWOOD CAVALCADE

performer

1939

THE JONES FAMILY IN HOLLYWOOD story

1939

THE JONES FAMILY IN QUICK MILLIONS

story

1939

MOOCHIN' THROUGH GEORGIA performer

1939

NOTHING BUT PLEASURE

performer

1939

PEST FROM THE WEST

performer

1940

COMRADE Xdirector

1940

LI'L ABNER performer

1940

NEW MOON performer

1940

PARDON MY BERTH MARKS

director

1940

THE SPOOK SPEAKS

director

1940

THE TAMING OF THE SNOOD

performer

1940

THE VILLAIN STILL PURSUED HER

performer

1941

GENERAL NUISANCE

performer

1941

HIS EX MARKS THE SPOT performer

1941

SHE'S OIL MINE

performer

1941

SO YOU WON'T SQUAWK performer

1942

TALES OF MANHATTAN screenwriter

1943

EL MODERNO BARBA-AZUL

performer

1943

FOREVER AND A DAY

performer

1943

I DOOD IT

director

1944

BATHING BEAUTY director

1944

NOTHING BUT TROUBLE director

1944

SAN DIEGO, I LOVE YOU performer

1944

TWO GIRLS AND A SAILOR

performer

1945

SHE WENT TO THE RACES

director

1945

THAT NIGHT WITH YOU performer

1945

THAT'S THE SPIRIT performer

1946

BOOM IN THE MOON

performer

1946

EQUESTRIAN QUIZ (WHAT'S YOUR I.Q.? NO. 11)

director

1946

GOD'S COUNTRY

performer

1947

CYNTHIA

uncredited screenwriter

1947

IT HAPPENED IN BROOKLYN

director

1947

MERTON OF THE MOVIES

director

1948

A SOUTHERN YANKEE

director

1949

IN THE GOOD OLD SUMMERTIME

performer

1949

THE LOVABLE CHEAT

performer

1949

NEPTUNE'S DAUGHTER

director

1949

YOU'RE MY EVERYTHING

performer

1950

SUNSET BLVD.

cameo

1950

UN DUEL Ŕ MORT screenwriter, performer

1950

WATCH THE BIRDIE

director

background image

1951

ÇA C'EST DU CINÉMA

director

1951

EXCUSE MY DUST director

1951

PARADISE FOR BUSTER performer

1952

LIMELIGHT performer

1953

L'INCANTEVOLE NEMICA

performer

1956

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS

performer

1960

THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN performer

1960

WHEN COMEDY WAS KING

performer

1962

TEN GIRLS AGO

performer

1963

30 YEARS OF FUN performer

1963

THE GREAT CHASE

performer

1963

IT'S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD

performer

1963

THE SOUND OF LAUGHTER

director

1964

PAJAMA PARTY

performer

1965

BEACH BLANKET BINGO performer

1965

BUSTER KEATON RIDES AGAIN performer

1965

FILM performer

1965

HOW TO STUFF A WILD BIKINI performer

1965

THE RAILRODDER performer

1965

SERGEANT DEADHEAD

performer

1966

DUE MARINES E UN GENERAL performer

1966

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM

performer

1967

WAR, ITALIAN STYLE

performer


Oliver Hardy (1892 - 1957)
Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy, one a lank, childlike innocent with a penchant for anarchy, the
other a rotund, bossy incompetent with a naďve pomposity, arrived on the film scene late
in the silent era. Their brand of comedy served as a link between the era of silent character
comedy, with its emphasis on aspirations to success and happiness, and the chaotic comedies
of the 1930s, with its complete bedlam created by the characters' consistent failures. Laurel
and Hardy slowed down the pace of silent slapstick, adjusting its gag structure for the more
mundane pacing of sound film comedy. In the process, the duo became two of the most
recognized faces in the film world.
Before their pairing in 1927, Laurel and Hardy had separate film careers, Stan's dating back to
1917 and Ollie's to 1913. As a teenager, Laurel joined Fred Karno's British music hall troupe,
understudying Charlie Chaplin. During the Karno troupe's first tour of the United States, he
quit the company in 1911, seeking success on the American vaudeville stage. He would later
rejoin Karno, only to quit a final time. Although he did meet with limited success in American
vaudeville, he made his first film appearance in NUTS IN MAY (1917), a slapdash slapstick
chaser. He then signed with Universal to make a series of shorts as the character Hickory
Hiram. In 1919, Laurel appeared in a modestly successful group of comedies that parodied
contemporary film hits. Despite two stints with the successful producer Hal Roach, by the
mid-20s, Laurel had practically given up the hope of being a successful comic performer; he
signed once again with Roach in 1926, this time as a writer and gagman.
As a young man, Oliver Hardy liked to sneak out of college and music school to go on the
road singing with theater quartets and minstrel shows. At 18, he managed the first movie
theater in Milledgeville, Georgia, but in 1913, he abandoned theatrical management for a
film career, joining the Lubin Company as a character player and general assistant. After
three years with Lubin, Hardy appeared through the late teens and early 20s in the Frank
Baum "Oz" series and as a comic foil for various silent film comedians such as Billy West,

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Earl Williams, Jimmy Aubrey and Larry Semon. By the mid-20s, Hardy, like Laurel, had
signed with Roach.
At that point, Roach was frantically seeking to regain the commercial success he had enjoyed
with Harold Lloyd, who had left him for feature film stardom. In an act of desperation, Roach
formed the Hal Roach Comedy All-Stars, into which he thrust his stock company of James
Finlayson, Max Davidson, Clyde Cook, Eugene Pallette, Edgar Kennedy, Noah Young, Mae
Busch, Anita Garvin and Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
It was only a matter of time before Roach's shuffling of his players would deal Laurel and
Hardy into the same film. SLIPPING WIVES (1927), however, found Laurel supporting
Hardy. It was PUTTING PANTS ON PHILIP (1927) in which the Laurel and Hardy team
first flowered. The famous mannerisms appeared, in Hardy's pomposity and Southern
courtliness and Laurel's squeaky, squashed-faced cries. Previously known for his frenetic
slapstick pace, Laurel slowed down and instead of a catalyst of action became a reactor to the
destruction raining down upon Hardy's head.
In their methodical style, Laurel and Hardy transformed silent comedy and conducted a
scientific investigation of gag structures. The jokes became rituals in which a gag is dissected,
studied and explained in a process of passionless stateliness. In this emotionless artifice, the
characters paused to await their fate. One character would stand by as his partner clipped
off his tie with a pair of garden shears. Equally detached, the second character would watch
as the tie-less gentleman clasps the shears and hurls them through the second character's
car windshield. In the world of Laurel and Hardy, there are continually dispassionate shifts
between victims and victimizers, resulting in mammoth destruction of hundreds of pies, a
traffic jam of dozens of cars or the gutting of an entire residential neighborhood.
Over the next several years, Laurel and Hardy refined their pace in such shorts as
LEAVE 'EM LAUGHING (1928), FROM SOUP TO NUTS (1928), BIG BUSINESS (1929)
and THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY (1927). The pair easily made the transition to sound,
their slapstick style perfectly suited to its reality-bound pacing. From 1930 to 1935, Laurel
and Hardy made several dozen shorts containing their best screen work, highlighted by the
Academy Award-winning THE MUSIC BOX (1932).
But the popularity of sound animated cartoons forced Laurel and Hardy into features, which
either encased the team in cumbersome operettas or expanded their short-subject comic
routines into clumsy assemblages. For every success—SONS OF THE DESERT (1933) or
WAY OUT WEST (1937)—there were several stumbles—BABES IN TOYLAND (1934),
PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES (1932) or SAPS AT SEA (1940). The end came when Laurel
and Hardy signed on with the big Hollywood studios (RKO, Fox, MGM), who emasculated
the darker aspects of their comedy and forced them into hackneyed formula films that denied
them the creative freedom permitted by Roach. By the time their last film, UTOPIA/ATOLL
K, was released in 1951, the team was bedraggled and gutted, Laurel looking seriously ill and
Hardy shocked and embarrassed.
But in their early films of 1927-35, Laurel and Hardy created brilliant comic structures and
developed two characters who perfectly complemented one another in a poetic, primordial
relationship that shifted from the realm of the comic into something broader which found its
ultimate reflection in the barren landscapes of Samuel Beckett.
1914

OUTWITTING DAD performer

1915

CHARLEY'S AUNT performer

1915

MIXED FLATS

performer

1915

PAPERHANGER'S HELPER

performer

1915

SPAGHETTI AND LOTTERY/SPAGHETTI A LA MODE

performer

1916

AUNT BILL performer

1916

BETTER HALVES

performer

background image

1916

DREAMY KNIGHTSperformer

1916

THE HEROES

performer

1916

HUMAN HOUNDS performer

1916

LOVE AND DUTY performer

1916

THE SERENADE

performer

1917

BACKSTAGE

performer

1917

THE FLY COP

performer

1917

THE HOBO

performer

1917

A LUCKY DOG

performer— isolated

1917

THE MILLIONAIRE performer

1917

THE PEST

performer

1917

THE VILLAIN

performer

1918

THE CHEF

performer

1918

THE HANDYMAN performer

1918

HELLO TROUBLE performer

1918

HIS DAY OUT

performer

1918

PLAYMATES

performer

1919

MULES AND MORTGAGES

performer

1920

MARRIED TO ORDER

performer

1921

BLIZZARD

performer

1922

FORTUNE'S MASK performer

1922

LITTLE WILDCAT performer

1923

ONE STOLEN NIGHT

performer

1923

THE THREE AGES performer

1924

THE KING OF THE WILD HORSES

performer

1925

THE WIZARD OF OZ

performer— as Tin Woodsman

1926

45 MINUTES FROM HOLLYWOOD

performer— joint appearance but not as a

team
1926

THE GENTLE CYCLONE

performer

1926

MADAME MYSTERY

performer

1926

THE PERFECT CLOWN

performer

1926

STOP, LOOK AND LISTEN assistant director, performer

1927

THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY performer

1927

CALL OF THE CUCKOOS performer

1927

DO DETECTIVES THINK? performer

1927

DUCK SOUP performer

1927

FLUTTERING HEARTS

performer

1927

HATS OFF

performer

1927

LOVE 'EM AND WEEP

performer

1927

NO MAN'S LAW

performer

1927

PUTTING PANTS ON PHILIP

performer

1927

SAILORS, BEWARE!

performer

1927

THE SECOND HUNDRED YEARS performer

1927

SLIPPING WIVES

performer

1927

SUGAR DADDIES

performer

1927

WHY GIRLS LOVE SAILORS

performer

1927

WITH LOVE AND HISSES performer

1928

THE FINISHING TOUCH

performer

1928

FLYING ELEPHANTS

performer

1928

FROM SOUP TO NUTS

performer

background image

1928

HABEAS CORPUS performer

1928

LEAVE 'EM LAUGHING

performer

1928

SHOULD MARRIED MEN GO HOME?

performer

1928

THEIR PURPLE MOMENT performer

1928

TWO TARS

performer

1928

WE FAW DOWN

performer

1928

YOU'RE DARN TOOTIN'

performer

1929

ANGORA LOVE

performer

1929

BACON GRABBERS

performer

1929

BERTH MARKS

performer

1929

BIG BUSINESS

performer

1929

DOUBLE WHOOPEE

performer

1929

THE HOLLYWOOD REVUE OF 1929

performer

1929

THE HOOSE-GOW performer

1929

LIBERTY

performer

1929

MEN O' WARperformer

1929

PERFECT DAY

performer

1929

THAT'S MY WIFE

performer

1929

THEY GO BOOM

performer

1929

UNACCUSTOMED AS WE ARE

performer— first talkie

1929

WRONG AGAIN

performer

1930

ANOTHER FINE MESS

performer

1930

BELOW ZERO

performer

1930

BLOTTO

performer

1930

BRATS

performer

1930

HOG WILD

performer

1930

THE LAUREL-HARDY MURDER CASE performer

1930

THE NIGHT OWLS performer

1930

THE ROGUE SONG performer

1931

BE BIG

performer

1931

BEAU HUNKS

performer

1931

CHICKENS COME HOME performer

1931

COME CLEAN

performer

1931

LAUGHING GRAVY

performer

1931

ON THE LOOSE

cameo

1931

ONE GOOD TURN performer

1931

OUR WIFE

performer

1931

PARDON US performer

1931

THE STOLEN JOOLS

performer— cameo appearances

1932

ANY OLD PORT

performer

1932

THE CHIMP performer

1932

COUNTY HOSPITAL

performer

1932

HELPMATES performer

1932

THE MUSIC BOX

performer

1932

PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES

performer

1932

SCRAM!

performer

1932

THEIR FIRST MISTAKE

performer

1932

TOWED IN A HOLE performer

1933

BUSY BODIES

performer

1933

THE DEVIL'S BROTHER/FRA DIAVOLO/BOGUS BANDITS performer

background image

1933

DIRTY WORK

performer

1933

ME AND MY PAL

performer

1933

THE MIDNIGHT PATROL performer

1933

SONS OF THE DESERT

performer

1933

TWICE TWO performer

1933

WILD POSES performer— cameos in "Our Gang" comedy

1934

BABES IN TOYLAND/MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS

performer

1934

GOING BYE-BYE! performer

1934

HOLLYWOOD PARTY

performer

1934

THE LIVE GHOST

performer

1934

OLIVER THE EIGHTH

performer

1934

THEM THAR HILLS performer

1935

BONNIE SCOTLAND

performer

1935

THE FIXER UPPERS

performer

1935

THICKER THAN WATER performer

1935

TIT FOR TATperformer

1936

THE BOHEMIAN GIRL

performer

1936

ON THE WRONG TREK

performer— cameos in Charlie Chase comedy

1936

OUR RELATIONS

performer

1937

PICK A STAR/MOVIE STRUCK

performer

1937

WAY OUT WEST

performer

1938

BLOCK-HEADS

performer

1938

SWISS MISS performer

1939

THE FLYING DEUCES/FLYING ACES

performer

1939

ZENOBIA

performer

1940

A CHUMP AT OXFORD

performer

1940

SAPS AT SEA

performer

1941

GREAT GUNS

performer

1942

A-HAUNTING WE WILL GO

performer

1943

AIR RAID WARDENS

performer

1943

THE DANCING MASTERS performer

1943

JITTERBUGS performer

1943

THE TREE IN A TEST TUBE

performer

1944

THE BIG NOISE

performer

1944

NOTHING BUT TROUBLE performer

1945

THE BULLFIGHTERS

performer

1949

THE FIGHTING KENTUCKIAN

performer

1950

RIDING HIGH

performer

1950

UTOPIA/ATOLL K/ROBINSON CRUSOELAND performer

1957

THE GOLDEN AGE OF COMEDY performer


Stan Laurel (1890 - 1965)
The son of an actress and an actor-director-producer-playwright-impresario, he made his own
stage debut at 16 at a small Glasgow, Scotland, theater and for the next few years played both
drama and comedy in plays and danced and clowned in British music halls. In 1910 he joined
the famous Fred Karno company and became Charlie Chaplin's understudy in the troupe's first
American tour that same year. He also played various roles in the company's feature attraction
A Night in an English Music Hall. He was Chaplin's understudy again during Karno's second
US tour in 1912. When the troupe returned to England, he stayed behind and began a lengthy
stint in American vaudeville, changing his name to Stan Laurel. In 1917 he made the first of

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76 film appearances that preceded his fortuitous teaming with Oliver Hardy in 1927. The two
comedians appeared in the same two-reel short, LUCKY DOG (1917), but their pairing in that
film was accidental, with Hardy playing a bit and Laurel starring.
Laurel's screen character in those early days was that of a clown, typically wearing oversized
clothes and playing the misfit. He continued performing in vaudeville while pursuing a
part-time film career in comedy shorts. He worked for various studios, including Universal,
Vitagraph, Hal Roach-Pathé and Metro, where he performed for a unit supervised by G. M.
Anderson of "Broncho Billy" fame. Many of these comedy shorts were spoofs of popular
feature films of the period. Laurel wrote many of his own comedy routines and occasionally
helped with the directing. In 1926 he signed a long-term contract with Hal Roach as a gagman
and director but shortly after was persuaded to return to acting, and to begin his long and
auspicious partnership with Oliver Hardy.
The "thin man" of the fat-thin duo, Laurel was often also the funnier member of the team,
with a wide array of mannerisms that endeared him to film audiences, among them a babylike
weep, a confused eye-blink, and a bewildered scratching of the top of the head. He was
the creative mind behind many of the team's comedy routines, a master of comedy nuance
and technique. Unconsolable after Hardy's death in 1957, he refused to resume performing
although he continued writing until his own death in 1965. In the Academy Award ceremony
for 1960, he received a special Oscar "for his creative pioneering in the field of cinema
comedy."
1917

A LUCKY DOG

performer— isolated, fortuitous co-appearance in same film

1917

NUTS IN MAY

performer

1918

FRAUDS AND FRENZIES performer

1918

HICKORY HIRAM performer

1918

HUNS AND HYPHENS

performer

1918

IT'S GREAT TO BE CRAZY

performer

1919

HOOT MAN performer

1919

SCARS AND STRIPES

performer

1921

MAKE IT SNAPPY performer

1922

THE EGG

performer

1922

MUD AND SAND

performer

1922

THE PEST

performer

1922

WEEK END PARTY performer

1923

COLLARS AND CUFFS

performer

1923

FROZEN HEARTS

performer

1923

THE HANDY MAN performer

1923

KILL OR CURE

performer

1923

A MAN ABOUT TOWN

performer

1923

ORANGES AND LEMONS performer

1923

ROUGHEST AFRICA

performer

1923

SEARCHING SANDS

performer

1923

SHORT ORDERS

performer

1923

THE SOILERS

performer

1923

UNDER TWO JAGS performer

1923

WHEN KNIGHTS WERE COLD

performer

1923

THE WHOLE TRUTH

performer

1924

BROTHERS UNDER THE CHIN

performer

1924

DETAINED

performer

1924

RUPERT OF HEE-HAW

performer

1924

SHORT KILTS

performer

background image

1924

SMITHY

performer

1924

WEST OF HOT DOGperformer

1924

WIDE OPEN SPACES

performer

1924

ZEB VS. PAPRIKA performer

1925

DR. PICKLE AND MR. PRIDE

performer

1925

HALF A MAN

performer

1925

NAVY BLUE DAYS performer

1925

PIE-EYED

performer

1925

THE SLEUTH

performer

1925

THE SNOW HAWK performer

1925

TWINS

performer

1926

45 MINUTES FROM HOLLYWOOD

performer— joint appearance but not as a

team
1926

ATTA BOY

performer

1926

GET 'EM YOUNG

performer

1926

MADAME MYSTERY

co-director

1926

ON THE FRONT PAGE

performer

1927

THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY performer

1927

CALL OF THE CUCKOOS performer

1927

DO DETECTIVES THINK? performer

1927

DUCK SOUP performer

1927

HATS OFF

performer

1927

LOVE 'EM AND WEEP

performer

1927

PUTTING PANTS ON PHILIP

performer

1927

SAILORS, BEWARE!

performer

1927

THE SECOND HUNDRED YEARS performer

1927

SLIPPING WIVES

performer

1927

SUGAR DADDIES

performer

1927

WHY GIRLS LOVE SAILORS

performer

1927

WITH LOVE AND HISSES performer

1928

THE FINISHING TOUCH

performer

1928

FLYING ELEPHANTS

performer

1928

FROM SOUP TO NUTS

performer

1928

HABEAS CORPUS performer

1928

LEAVE 'EM LAUGHING

performer

1928

SHOULD MARRIED MEN GO HOME?

performer

1928

THEIR PURPLE MOMENT performer

1928

TWO TARS

performer

1928

WE FAW DOWN

performer

1928

YOU'RE DARN TOOTIN'

performer

1929

ANGORA LOVE

performer

1929

BACON GRABBERS

performer

1929

BERTH MARKS

performer

1929

BIG BUSINESS

performer

1929

DOUBLE WHOOPEE

performer

1929

THE HOLLYWOOD REVUE OF 1929

performer

1929

THE HOOSE-GOW performer

1929

LIBERTY

performer

1929

MEN O' WARperformer

1929

PERFECT DAY

performer

background image

1929

THAT'S MY WIFE

performer

1929

THEY GO BOOM

performer

1929

UNACCUSTOMED AS WE ARE

performer— first talkie

1929

WRONG AGAIN

performer

1930

ANOTHER FINE MESS

performer

1930

BELOW ZERO

performer

1930

BLOTTO

performer

1930

BRATS

performer

1930

HOG WILD

performer

1930

THE LAUREL-HARDY MURDER CASE performer

1930

THE NIGHT OWLS performer

1930

THE ROGUE SONG performer

1931

BE BIG

performer

1931

BEAU HUNKS

performer

1931

CHICKENS COME HOME performer

1931

COME CLEAN

performer

1931

LAUGHING GRAVY

performer

1931

ON THE LOOSE

cameo

1931

ONE GOOD TURN performer

1931

OUR WIFE

performer

1931

PARDON US performer

1931

THE STOLEN JOOLS

performer— cameo appearances

1932

ANY OLD PORT

performer

1932

THE CHIMP performer

1932

COUNTY HOSPITAL

performer

1932

HELPMATES performer

1932

THE MUSIC BOX

performer

1932

PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES

performer

1932

SCRAM!

performer

1932

THEIR FIRST MISTAKE

performer

1932

TOWED IN A HOLE performer

1933

BUSY BODIES

performer

1933

THE DEVIL'S BROTHER/FRA DIAVOLO/BOGUS BANDITS performer

1933

DIRTY WORK

performer

1933

ME AND MY PAL

performer

1933

THE MIDNIGHT PATROL performer

1933

SONS OF THE DESERT

performer

1933

TWICE TWO performer

1933

WILD POSES performer— cameos in "Our Gang" comedy

1934

BABES IN TOYLAND/MARCH OF THE WOODEN SOLDIERS

performer

1934

GOING BYE-BYE! performer

1934

HOLLYWOOD PARTY

performer

1934

THE LIVE GHOST

performer

1934

OLIVER THE EIGHTH

performer

1934

THEM THAR HILLS performer

1935

BONNIE SCOTLAND

performer

1935

THE FIXER UPPERS

performer

1935

THICKER THAN WATER performer

1935

TIT FOR TATperformer

1936

THE BOHEMIAN GIRL

performer

background image

1936

ON THE WRONG TREK

performer— cameos in Charlie Chase comedy

1936

OUR RELATIONS

producer— also produced by Laurel, performer--also produced

by Laurel
1937

PICK A STAR/MOVIE STRUCK

performer

1937

WAY OUT WEST

producer— also produced by Laurel, performer--also produced

by Laurel
1938

BLOCK-HEADS

performer

1938

SWISS MISS performer

1939

THE FLYING DEUCES/FLYING ACES

performer

1940

A CHUMP AT OXFORD

performer

1940

SAPS AT SEA

performer

1941

GREAT GUNS

performer

1942

A-HAUNTING WE WILL GO

performer

1943

AIR RAID WARDENS

performer

1943

THE DANCING MASTERS performer

1943

JITTERBUGS performer

1943

THE TREE IN A TEST TUBE

performer

1944

THE BIG NOISE

performer

1944

NOTHING BUT TROUBLE performer

1945

THE BULLFIGHTERS

performer

1950

UTOPIA/ATOLL K/ROBINSON CRUSOELAND performer

1957

THE GOLDEN AGE OF COMEDY performer

1960

WHEN COMEDY WAS KING

performer

1963

30 YEARS OF FUN performer

5

Charles Chaplin (1889 - 1977)
James Agee wrote that "the finest pantomime, the deepest emotion, the richest and most
poignant poetry were in Chaplin's work." Andrew Sarris called Chaplin "the single most
important artist produced by the cinema, certainly its most extraordinary performer, and
probably still its most universal icon." In a career spanning half a century, the soaring flicker
of the Chaplin myth has been immense, enveloping both the cinema and world culture in its
glow.
Chaplin's childhood was marked by wretched poverty, hunger, cruelty and loneliness—
subjects which became major themes in his silent comedies. Born in London to music hall
entertainers, the young Chaplin saw his father die of alcoholism and his mother go insane,
forcing him and his brother Sydney into a succession of workhouses. His escape from
grueling poverty was through the theater, where by the age of 16 he was playing the featured
role of Billy in William Gillette's West End production of Sherlock Holmes (1905). At the
prompting of his brother, Chaplin secured a spot in Fred Karno's music hall revue, appearing
as a drunk in "A Night in the English Music Hall" and in the sketches "Mummingbirds"
and "Harlequinade in Black and White." While the Karno troupe was touring the US, Chaplin
was spotted by film producer Mack Sennett and signed to his Keystone Company.
Chaplin's performances drew on the pantomime traditions of the French and British music
halls—a style decisively out of place in the mechanized world of Sennett, who ran his studio
with production-line efficiency, churning out two films a week and allowing no more than ten
camera setups per film. For an actor used to refining a set character night after night with the
Karno company, the Sennett style was a loud slap in the face.
In his first film for Sennett, MAKING A LIVING (1914), Chaplin played a boulevard roué
in the finicky Max Linder manner. But in KID AUTO RACES AT VENICE (1914) and

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MABEL'S STRANGE PREDICAMENT (1914), Chaplin emerged in his emblematic costume
(influenced by Dan Leno and Fred Kitchen from his Karno days) of baggy pants, decrepit
shoes on the wrong feet, carefully trimmed moustache, cane and dirty derby hat, moving with
a gait and manner contrary to his slovenly appearance.
KID AUTO RACES AT VENICE demonstrated Chaplin's uncanny ability to communicate
with his audience. As Sennett's comic buffoons mugged on the sidelines of a kiddie car
race, Chaplin held the camera with his gaze. By his thirteenth film, CAUGHT IN THE
RAIN (1914), Chaplin had begun to direct himself, and the fissure between the Sennett and
Chaplin styles was beginning to widen. Chaplin began to move the camera closer than Sennett
permitted, allowing his costume to function as an extension of character rather than a simple
jester's emblem. Chaplin brought to the frenetic Keystone world a comedy of emotions, an
ability to convey thoughts and feelings more in line with a Lillian Gish than a Ford Sterling
or Ben Turpin. He also slowed the breakneck Keystone pace, reducing the number of gags per
film and increasing the time devoted to each.
Within a year, Chaplin had revolutionized film comedy, transforming it from the rag-tag
knockabout farces of Sennett into an art form by introducing characterization, mime and
slapstick pathos. As a director, Chaplin rebelled against the montage technique of Griffith; he
introduced, in André Bazin's words, a "comedy of space" in which the Tramp interacted with
other objects in the mise-en-scčne and reconstructed them through his presence. Chaplin's
subtle and reflective acting techniques also radically changed the notion of film performance,
allowing action to be motivated through character rather than through some exterior force.
Thanks to Chaplin, comedy began to be centered on the performer as opposed to the events
which befall him or her—an emphasis on character which paved the way for the subsequent
achievements of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon and Stan Laurel.
But it was the public, most of all, who transformed Chaplin from a star into a mythic figure.
By 1915 he was a household word. Cartoons, poems and comic strips under the Chaplin name
appeared in newspapers. Chaplin dolls, toys and books were manufactured. While the public
eagerly awaited the release of the next Chaplin production, pretenders to the throne raced in,
comics like Lloyd, Billy West, Billy Ritchie and even someone who billed himself as Charlie
Alpin.
Chaplin took advantage of his fame to consolidate control over his career and Tramp
character. The years 1915-25 not only marked the period of his greatest popularity, but
the time in which Chaplin, bucking the newly formed studio system, held his own as an
independent filmmaker. His spiraling salaries reflected both his popularity and his artistic
freedom. After leaving Sennett, where he had begun at $150 a week, Chaplin signed with
Essanay Studios at a salary of $1250 per week. By 1918, Chaplin's fame led to film's first
million-dollar contract, with First National, which also agreed to build a studio for him.
At Essanay, Chaplin began to assemble his stock company and, with the emergence of Edna
Purviance as his leading lady, introduced an element of sentimentality and gentlemanly
respect into his films. The Sennett knockabout factor was still a dominant ingredient, but
it was tempered with humanity and the gags featured a degree of experimentation. With
THE BANK (1915) and THE TRAMP (1915), Chaplin introduced a new comic twist—the
unhappy ending. In THE TRAMP, Chaplin for the first time exits the film alone, with a kick
of the feet and a twirl of the cane, down a deserted road.
Chaplin's twelve Mutual films of 1916 and 1917 rank among his greatest achievements.
ONE A.M. (1916), THE PAWNSHOP (1916), BEHIND THE SCREEN (1916), THE RINK
(1916), EASY STREET (1917), THE CURE (1917), THE IMMIGRANT (1917) and THE
ADVENTURER (1917) all revealed a master at work, with mime and satire, sentimentality
and slapstick all stitched into a seamless whole.

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In such First National films as A DOG'S LIFE (1918), SHOULDER ARMS (1918) and THE
PILGRIM (1923), Chaplin took his first serious steps toward feature-length comedy. THE
KID (1921), expanded from a planned three-reeler, proved that the Chaplin persona could
sustain his comic appeal for the duration of a feature-length film, broadening the parameters
of screen comedy and paving the way for the works of Lloyd and Keaton.
In 1919, Chaplin (along with fellow stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and director
D.W. Griffith) formed United Artists as a vehicle for distributing their films without studio
interference. Chaplin's first United Artists production was the atypical A WOMAN OF
PARIS (1923), a comedy of manners and the swan song for Chaplin's costar Edna Purviance.
He appeared in the film only in a cameo role and it was his first financial failure (although it
proved to be an influence on Ernst Lubitsch, who adapted its understatement and ellipses for
his 1924 film THE MARRIAGE CIRCLE).
With THE GOLD RUSH (1925), Chaplin basked once again in the public's adulation. By this
time, however, his output had begun to slow as he assiduously refined his art, subjecting his
comic persona to an increasingly microscopic scrutiny. THE CIRCUS (1928) investigates the
nature of comedy and audience acceptance. CITY LIGHTS (1931) is a chamber study musing
on the fine line between comedy and tragedy, as well as a deification of the Tramp character.
In MODERN TIMES (1936) Chaplin bid farewell to the Tramp, leaving society in satirical
ruins and again walking into the sunrise, but this time with a street urchin in tow.
The look of Chaplin's films also changed during this period. In what may have been a
response to a series of emotionally draining scandals, Chaplin had increasingly restricted his
productions to the studio; the settings consequently took on an otherworldly look in a kind of
retreat from the reality of 1930s America. His sentimentality had also become laced with dark
strains of cynicism and hopelessness. ("An old tramp is not funny," he once explained.)
The startling transformation of Chaplin into the murderous MONSIEUR VERDOUX (1947)
turned his once adoring public against him. Finally, in 1952, amid an atmosphere of Red-
baiting hysteria, Chaplin, who had never become an American citizen, found his re-entry
permit to the US revoked after he had attended the London premiere of LIMELIGHT (1952).
Public reaction against Chaplin was so rabid that A KING IN NEW YORK (1957), a gentle
satire on American consumerism and political paranoia, remained unreleased in the United
States until 1976. Chaplin's last film, A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG (1967), proved
to be a sadly anachronistic farce more appropriate to the 1930s and totally out of place in a
cinematic era that included WEEKEND, BONNIE AND CLYDE and THE GRADUATE.
Chaplin was the subject of Richard Attenborough's affectionate biographical film, CHAPLIN
(1992), in which Robert Downey, Jr. gave a remarkably convincing performance in the
demanding title role.
1914

BETWEEN SHOWERS

uncredited screenwriter, performer

1914

A BUSY DAY

director, screenwriter, performer

1914

CAUGHT IN A CABARET director, screenwriter, performer

1914

CAUGHT IN THE RAIN

director, screenwriter, performer

1914

CRUEL, CRUEL LOVE

uncredited screenwriter, performer

1914

DOUGH AND DYNAMITE director, performer

1914

THE FACE ON THE BARROOM FLOOR director, screenwriter, performer

1914

THE FATAL MALLET

director, screenwriter, performer

1914

A FILM JOHNNIE

uncredited screenwriter, performer

1914

GENTLEMEN OF NERVE director, screenwriter, performer

1914

GETTING ACQUAINTED director, screenwriter, performer

1914

HER FRIEND THE BANDIT

director, screenwriter, performer

1914

HIS FAVORITE PASTIME uncredited screenwriter, performer

1914

HIS MUSICAL CAREER

director, screenwriter, performer

background image

1914

HIS NEW PROFESSION

director, screenwriter, performer

1914

HIS PREHISTORIC PAST

director, screenwriter, performer

1914

HIS TRYSTING PLACE

director, screenwriter, performer

1914

KID AUTO RACES AT VENICE

uncredited screenwriter, performer

1914

THE KNOCKOUT

uncredited screenwriter, performer

1914

LAUGHING GAS

director, screenwriter, performer

1914

MABEL AT THE WHEEL

uncredited screenwriter, performer

1914

MABEL'S BUSY DAY

director, screenwriter, performer

1914

MABEL'S MARRIED LIFE director, screenwriter, performer

1914

MABEL'S STRANGE PREDICAMENT

uncredited screenwriter, performer

1914

MAKING A LIVING uncredited screenwriter, performer

1914

THE MASQUERADER

director, screenwriter, performer

1914

THE NEW JANITOR director, screenwriter, performer

1914

THE PROPERTY MAN

director, screenwriter, performer

1914

RECREATION

director, screenwriter, performer

1914

THE ROUNDERS

director, screenwriter, performer

1914

THE STAR BOARDER

uncredited screenwriter, performer

1914

TANGO TANGLES uncredited screenwriter, performer

1914

THOSE LOVE PANGS

director, screenwriter, performer

1914

TILLIE'S PUNCTURED ROMANCE

performer

1914

TWENTY MINUTES OF LOVE

uncredited screenwriter, performer

1915

THE BANK

director, screenwriter, performer

1915

BY THE SEA director, screenwriter, performer

1915

THE CHAMPION

director, screenwriter, performer

1915

HIS NEW JOB

director, screenwriter, performer

1915

HIS REGENERATION

performer

1915

IN THE PARK

director, screenwriter, performer

1915

A JITNEY ELOPEMENT

director, screenwriter, performer

1915

A NIGHT IN THE SHOW

director, screenwriter, performer

1915

A NIGHT OUT

director, screenwriter, performer

1915

SHANGHAIED

director, screenwriter, performer

1915

THE TRAMP director, screenwriter, performer

1915

A WOMAN

director, screenwriter, performer

1915

WORK

director, screenwriter, performer

1916

BEHIND THE SCREEN

producer, director, screenwriter, performer

1916

CHARLIE CHAPLIN'S BURLESQUE ON CARMEN

director, screenwriter,

performer
1916

THE COUNT director, screenwriter, performer

1916

THE FIREMAN

director, screenwriter, performer

1916

THE FLOORWALKER

director, screenwriter, performer

1916

ONE A.M.

producer, director, screenwriter, performer

1916

THE PAWNSHOP

producer, director, screenwriter, performer

1916

POLICE!

director, screenwriter, performer

1916

THE RINK

producer, director, screenwriter, performer

1916

THE VAGABOND

director, screenwriter, performer

1917

THE ADVENTURERdirector, screenwriter, performer

1917

THE CURE

director, screenwriter, performer

1917

EASY STREET

director, screenwriter, performer

1917

THE IMMIGRANT

director, screenwriter, performer

1918

THE BOND

director, screenwriter, performer

background image

1918

A DOG'S LIFE

director, screenwriter, performer

1918

SHOULDER ARMS director, screenwriter, performer

1919

A DAY'S PLEASURE

producer, director, screenwriter, performer

1919

SUNNYSIDE producer, director, screenwriter, performer

1921

THE IDLE CLASS

producer, director, screenwriter, performer

1921

THE KID

producer, director, screenwriter, performer

1921

THE NUT

performer

1922

NICE AND FRIENDLY

director, screenwriter, performer

1922

PAY DAY

producer, director, screenwriter, performer

1923

THE PILGRIM

producer, director, screenwriter, performer

1923

SOULS FOR SALE performer

1923

A WOMAN OF PARIS

producer, director, screenwriter, music, performer

1925

THE GOLD RUSH

producer, director, screenwriter, performer

1926

A WOMAN OF THE SEA

producer, idea

1928

THE CIRCUS producer, director, screenwriter, editor, performer

1928

SHOW PEOPLE

performer

1931

CITY LIGHTS

producer, director, editor, performer

1932

CHASE ME CHARLIE

performer

1936

MODERN TIMES

producer, director, screenwriter, composer, performer

1938

CHARLIE CHAPLIN CARNIVAL producer, director, screenwriter, performer

1938

CHARLIE CHAPLIN CAVALCADE

producer, director, screenwriter,

performer
1938

CHARLIE CHAPLIN FESTIVAL

director, screenwriter, performer

1940

THE GREAT DICTATOR

producer, director, screenwriter, performer

1947

MONSIEUR VERDOUX

producer, director, screenwriter, composer, performer

1952

LIMELIGHT producer, director, story, choreography, performer

1955

GASLIGHT FOLLIES

performer

1957

A KING IN NEW YORK

producer, director, screenwriter, composer, performer

1958

THE CHAPLIN REVUE

producer, director, screenwriter, performer

1960

WHEN COMEDY WAS KING

performer

1963

30 YEARS OF FUN performer

1967

A COUNTESS FROM HONG KONG

executive producer, director,

screenwriter, music, song, performer
1972

CHAPLINESQUE, MY LIFE AND HARD TIMES performer

1975

SMILE

composer

1976

IT'S SHOWTIME

performer

6

Fritz Lang (1890 - 1976)
HUMAN DESIRE (1954), made during Fritz Lang's last decade as a film director, begins
with an emblematic image: a locomotive rushes forward, swift and dynamic, but locked to the
tracks, its path fixed, its destination visible. Like Lang's films the train and the tracks speak of
a world of narrowly defined choices. The closing image is even more severe: survivor Glenn
Ford departs, his locomotive passing a sign on a bridge. Ford does not see the sign, but we
do; abbreviated by intervening beams we suddenly see "The world takes" just before the film
ends.
This vision of a hostile universe, constraints on freedom and messages that are missed or
misunderstood but always seen by someone, can be found in all of Fritz Lang's films. His
work has a consistency and a richness that are unique in world cinema. In Germany, in
France, in Hollywood, then in Germany again, Lang built genre worlds for producers and

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audiences and veiled meditations on human experience for himself.
Lang's vision is that of the outsider. James Baldwin, an outsider himself, catches
Lang's "concern, or obsession … with the fact and effect of human loneliness, and the ways
in which we are all responsible for the creation, and the fate, of the isolated…" Born an
Austrian, Lang fled his training as an architect for a jaunt through the middle and far east,
returned to Paris just in time for the beginning of WWI, then fought on the losing side of the
war. Recovering from wounds which cost him the sight in his right eye, Lang wrote his first
scenarios: a werewolf story which found no buyers, and WEDDING IN THE ECCENTRIC
CLUB and HILDE WARREN AND DEATH, which were sold and eventually produced by
Joe May. May's deviations from Lang's scripts motivated Lang to become a director himself;
his first movie was HALBBLUT (1919)/THE HALF-CASTE, a still-lost film about the
revenge of a half-Mexican mistress. Later that year he directed the first film of a two-part
international thriller called THE SPIDERS (1919)/DIE SPINNEN. Part one, subtitled THE
GOLDEN LAKE, proved so popular that his producers insisted Lang immediately make part
two, THE DIAMOND SHIP. He had been working on another script which he hoped to film,
so he reluctantly gave up THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919) to Robert Wiene. His
contribution to that landmark film nevertheless was crucial: Lang thought up the framing
device, in which it is revealed at the story's end that we have been watching a tale told by a
madman, thus significantly undercutting the audience's perceptions of the story.
Lang's career in the 1920s was one of spectacular rise to fame. With each film, he became
more assured, garnering critical acclaim as well as a popular following. DR. MABUSE: DER
SPIELER (THE GAMBLER) (1922), DIE NIBELUNGEN (1924), METROPOLIS (1926),
and SPIES (1928) are among the greatest silent films produced anywhere. Lang also made
a remarkable transtition to sound, with M (1931), but he ran afoul of Nazi authorities with
THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (1933)/DAS TESTAMENT DES DR. MABUSE/
THE LAST WILL OF DR. MABUSE, whose villains mouthed Nazi propaganda. When the
film was banned and Lang was requested to make films for the cause of the Third Reich, he
immediately fled Germany, leaving behind most of his personal possessions, as well as his
wife, screenwriter Thea Von Harbou (who had joined the Nazi party and become an official
screenwriter).
Lang made one film in France, then moved on to Hollywood, where he spent the next 20
years working in a variety of genres, mainly thrillers (e.g. MAN HUNT, 1941, SCARLET
STREET, 1945, WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS, 1956) and some outstanding westerns (THE
RETURN OF FRANK JAMES, 1940, RANCHO NOTORIOUS, 1952). Tired of warring
with insensitive producers, Lang left the US in the mid-50s to make a film in India and then
returned to Germany for his last set of films, including a final chapter in the Dr. Mabuse saga.
The disorienting frame in CALIGARI is an important part of Lang's distinctive vision. His
films are punctuated by shifts of viewpoint and discoveries which transform the reactions of
his characters—and of his audience. The most obvious of these shifts of viewpoint come in
CALIGARI and THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (1944), in which the drama is suddenly
revealed to be a dream. But they also occur in the Mabuse films; in M, with the policeman
mistaken by a burglar for another thief; and in THE HOUSE BY THE RIVER (1950), when a
servant is strangled because another maid appears to be responding to her cries for help.
Lang's films are also about contingency, the recognition that extra-personal forces mold our
lives, shape our destiny in ways we cannot predict and only somewhat modify. In the two-
part film, DIE NIBELUNGEN, Kriemhild is transformed from a secondary figure in the first
film (SIEGFRIED) into a whirlwind of fury in the second (KRIEMHILD'S REVENGE).
Even the characters in the film are shaken by these transformations. The king of the Huns is
staggered by Kriemhild's thirst for death; the vengeful underworld in M that has captured and
tried Peter Lorre is taken aback by Lorre's confession that he "must" rape and murder, that he

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is something of a spectator to his crimes.
These moments of perception are the foundation of Lang's importance and continuing strength
as a filmmaker. They constitute a kind of morality that he never abandoned. In the script for
LILIOM (1934), his French film made after he fled the Nazis, Lang wrote, "If death settled
everything it would be too easy… Where would justice be if death settled everything?" Thirty
years later, playing himself in Jean-Luc Godard's CONTEMPT (1963), Lang wrote for his
character, "La mort n'est pas une solution." ("Death is no solution.") Nor does death erase
human striving. In BETWEEN TWO WORLDS (1921)/DER MÜDE TOD/BEYOND THE
WALL/DESTINY the force of love survives, in FURY (1936) the cycle of vengeance is
broken, in CLASH BY NIGHT (1952) Barbara Stanwyck chooses reponsibility, in THE BIG
HEAT (1953) Glenn Ford finally turns to the police and ends his vendetta, and in HUMAN
DESIRE Ford again leaves the scene of the crime, choosing life over the locus of death.
1916

DIE PEITSCHE

screenwriter

1917

HILDE WARREN AND DEATH/HILDE WARREN UND DER TOD

director,

performer
1917

WEDDING IN THE ECCENTRIC CLUB/DIE HOCHZEIT IN EXZENTRIC-CLUB
uncredited screenwriter

1918

DIE BETTLER-G.M.B.H.

screenwriter

1918

DIE RACHE IST MEIN

screenwriter

1919

DER HERR DER LIEBE

director, performer

1919

DIE FRAU MIT DEN ORCHIDEENscreenwriter

1919

DIE PEST IN FLORENZ

screenwriter

1919

THE HALF CASTE/HALBBLUT

director, screenwriter

1919

HARAKIRI

director

1919

LILITH UND LY

screenwriter

1919

MISTRESS OF THE WORLD/DIE HERRIN DER WELT assistant director

1919

SPIDERS/DIE SPINNEN

director

1919

TOTENTANZscreenwriter

1919

WOLKENBAU UND FLIMMERSTERN

screenwriter

1920

DAS WANDERNDE BILD director, screenwriter

1921

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS/DER MÜDE TOD/BEYOND THE WALL/DESTINY
director, screenwriter

1921

THE INDIAN TOMB/DAS INDISCHE GRABMAL

director

1921

VIER UM DIE FRAU

director, screenwriter

1922

DR. MABUSE, KING OF CRIME

director

1922

DR. MABUSE: DER SPIELER (THE GAMBLER)/DR. MABUSE DER SPIELER/

DR. MABUSE

director

1924

DIE NIBELUNGEN/KRIEMHILD'S REVENGE/SIEGFRIED

screenwriter

1924

DIE NIBELUNGEN/KRIEMHILD'S REVENGE/SIEGFRIED

director

1926

METROPOLIS

director, screenwriter

1928

SPIES/SPIONE

producer, screenwriter, story

1928

SPIES/SPIONE

director

1929

WOMAN IN THE MOON/DIE FRAU IM MOND/GIRL IN THE MOON/BY

ROCKET TO THE MOON

producer, director, co-screenwriter

1931

M

director, screenwriter

1933

THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE/DAS TESTAMENT DES DR. MABUSE/

THE LAST WILL OF DR. MABUSE/CRIMES OF DR. MABUSE

producer, director,

screenwriter
1934

LILIOM

director, screenwriter

1936

FURY director, screenwriter

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1937

YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE

director

1938

YOU AND ME

producer, director

1940

THE RETURN OF FRANK JAMES director

1941

MAN HUNT director

1941

WESTERN UNION director

1942

MOONTIDE director

1943

HANGMEN ALSO DIE

producer, director, adaptation, story

1944

MINISTRY OF FEAR

director

1944

THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW director

1945

SCARLET STREET producer, director

1946

CLOAK AND DAGGER

director

1948

SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR

producer, director

1950

AMERICAN GUERILLA IN THE PHILIPPINES director

1950

THE HOUSE BY THE RIVER

director

1951

M

from screenplay

1952

CLASH BY NIGHT director

1952

RANCHO NOTORIOUS

director

1953

THE BIG HEAT

director

1953

THE BLUE GARDENIA

director

1953

HOLLYWOOD GOES A-FISHIN'

performer

1954

HUMAN DESIRE

director

1955

MOONFLEET

director

1956

BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT

director

1956

WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS director

1958

THE TIGER OF ESCHNAPUR/DER TIGER VON ESCHNAPUR/JOURNEY TO

THE LOST CITY/DAS INDISCHE GRABMAL

director, screenwriter

1959

THE INDIAN TOMB/DAS INDISCHE GRABMAL/JOURNEY TO THE LOST

CITY director
1960

THE THOUSAND EYES OF DR. MABUSE/DIE TAUSEND AUGEN DES DR.

MABUSE/DIABOLICAL DR. MABUSE/SECRET OF DR. MABUSE

producer, director,

screenwriter
1963

CONTEMPT/LE MEPRIS

performer

1964

BEGEGNUNG MIT FRITZ LANG performer

1972

75 YEARS OF CINEMA MUSEUM performer


F.W. Murnau (1888 - 1931)
F.W. Murnau's brief career remains an emblem of the darkly romantic Hollywood of the
1920s. Between 1919 and his death in 1931, he completed 22 films. Arriving in Hollywood
from Germany in 1926 with an "enviable reputation" based on THE LAST LAUGH (1924)
/DER LETZTE MANN and FAUST (1926), Murnau immediately began to run afoul of the
developing studio system as he started a five-picture contract with Fox Film. In February
1929, as he was completing the third film (CITY GIRL), Fox severed the relationship.
Although SUNRISE (1927) had been a great success, FOUR DEVILS (1928) had failed to
match it. With the coming of sound, and Murnau's contract scale increasing, Fox became
anxious about the work of this European artist and began to interfere with his projects.
Like so many Europeans in Hollywood at the time, he had come to the new world to
harness the enticing technical apparatus of the Hollywood studio system, and, he declared,
to make "finer films with an international appeal." But more than most of his compatriots,
Murnau failed at the politics of Hollywood. His untimely accidental death marked the end of
an era, completing the myth of the romantic artist destroyed by the "well-meaning cruelty of a

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mighty industry," as one critic described it.
Murnau had first attracted attention after WWI as an exponent of the German expressionist
style which evoked the instability, disorientation and despair of the period. His films deal with
universal themes of human frailty, decline, self-conflict and redemption in a tragic world.
His characters struggle to find psychological peace and self-revelation, external love and
commitment. Like much of the best in silent film, it is a Victorian world.
Since only a few of Murnau's films made in 1919 and 1920 exist, it is difficult to establish
a thematic framework before NOSFERATU (1922). Lotte Eisner's description of Murnau's
first film, THE BLUE BOY (1919)/DER KNABE IN BLAU, indicates that the protagonist's
obsessive quest for a cursed family jewel leads to tragedy, meliorated finally by a woman's
love. From the melodramatic plot twists of JOURNEY INTO THE NIGHT (1920)/DER
GANG IN DIE NACHT emerges a failed quest to capture a love.
In NOSFERATU (1922), Jonathan's quest to contain external evil fails; he realizes that the
evil within himself is the cause. Nora, his wife, must sacrifice herself to redeem mankind.
In THE LAST LAUGH a proud doorman is stripped of status and self-esteem, reduced to
a lavatory attendant. Murnau transforms this simple drama into a psychological quest for
self-integrity. The quest of FAUST, on the other hand, is for world redemption. He must fall
from grace and experience his own internal demon before realizing a potential for love and
sacrifice.
In SUNRISE Murnau builds a "city from nowhere," a universal setting. The film abounds
with dramatic oppositions: family versus illicit love; life versus death; urban civilization
versus nature. The husband in SUNRISE finds internal salvation by returning to the
commitment of a relationship and the sanctuary of marriage.
For Murnau, the natural world is as passionate and volatile as his characters. In
NOSFERATU, darkness struggles with light. In SUNRISE, the violent storm leads to
resolution. In CITY GIRL, a hailstorm almost destroys the family but also acts as a catalyst
for self-realization.
If natural elements are characters for Murnau, so is the camera. Few other filmmakers of the
1920s revel so in mise-en-scčne. The opening title of FAUST announces a "poem in pictures."
(Murnau generally disdained intertitles, claiming, "I'd do away with all film titles. They are
really unnecessary if the continuity runs smoothly.") In THE LAST LAUGH, CITY GIRL
and SUNRISE the characters are constricted within a cramped frame which conveys the harsh
social reality of their lives. The continuously gliding camera of THE LAST LAUGH captures
the silent dignity, joyous abandon, and—finally—internal torment of the doorman.
Murnau's camera finds its most eloquent expression in SUNRISE. Camera movement entraps
characters, intensifying conflict. The great tracking shot on the tram, as the husband and wife
enter the city, remains a subject of study for student filmmakers even today.
1919

THE BLUE BOY/DER KNABE IN BLAU director

1919

SATANAS

director

1920

THE HUNCHBACK AND THE DANCER/DER BUCKLIGE UND DIE TÄNZERIN
director

1920

THE JANUS HEAD/DER JANUSKOPF

director

1920

JOURNEY INTO THE NIGHT/DER GANG IN DIE NACHT

director

1920

LONGING/SEHNSUCHT

director

1921

THE HAUNTED CASTLE/SCHLOSS VOGELÖD director

1921

MARIZZA, CALLED THE SMUGGLERS' MADONNA/MARIZZA, GENNANT

DIE SCHMUGGLERMADONNA

director

1922

BURNING SOIL/DER BRENNENDE ACKER

director

1922

NOSFERATU/NOSFERATU—EINE SYMPHONIE DES GRAUENS/NOSFERATU

THE VAMPIRE

director

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1922

PHANTOM

director

1923

THE EXPULSION/DIE AUSTREIBUNG—DIE MACHT DER ZWEITEN FRAU
director

1923

THE GRAND DUKE'S FINANCES/DIE FINANZEN DES GROSSHERZOGS
director

1924

THE LAST LAUGH/DER LETZTE MANNdirector

1925

TARTUFFE/TARTÜFF

director

1926

FAUST

director

1927

SUNRISE

director

1928

FOUR DEVILS

director

1930

CITY GIRL

producer, director

1931

TABU director,

7


Yakov Protazanov (1881 - 1945)
A prolific, energetic, sure-handed filmmaker, he began his career in 1905 as an actor, then
directed more than 40 Russian films between 1909 and 1917. Many of these were grand-scale
historical panoramas and literary adaptations, often starring Ivan Mozhukhin. Protazanov
continued his activity in Soviet films during and after the October Revolution with the
exception of the early 20s, which he spent working in France. His AELITA (1924) is the
Soviet cinema's first science fiction film.
1909

THE DEATH OF IVAN THE TERRIBLE

director

1909

THE FOUNTAIN OF BAKHCHISRAI

director

1910

A NIGHT IN MAY

director

1911

THE PRISONER'S SONG

director

1912

ANFISA

director

1912

DEPARTURE OF A GRAND OLD MAN

director

1913

A CHOPIN NOCTURNE

director

1913

HONORING THE RUSSIAN FLAGdirector

1913

HOW FINE HOW FRESH THE ROSES WERE

director

1913

KEYS TO HAPPINESS

co-director

1913

THE SHATTERED VASE

director

1914

DANCE OF THE VAMPIREdirector

1914

GUARDIAN OF VIRTUE

director

1914

LOVE director

1915

THE DEVIL director

1915

NIKOLAI STAVROGIN

director

1915

PLEBEIAN

director

1915

SIN

co-director

1915

WAR AND PEACE co-director

1916

HOUSE OF DEATH director

1916

THE QUEEN OF SPADES/PIKOVAYA DAMA

director

1916

WOMAN WITH A DAGGER

director

1917

ANDREI KOZHUKHOV

director

1917

DAMNED MILLIONS

director

1917

PUBLIC PROSECUTOR

director

1917

SATAN TRIUMPHANT

director

1918

FATHER SERGIUS/OTETS SERGEY

director

1918

PARASITES OF LIFE

director

background image

1919

THE BLACK HORDE

director

1919

THE QUEEN'S SECRET

director

1920

MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT

director

1921

JUSTICE D'ABORD director

1922

LE SENS DE LA MORT

director

1923

L'OMBRE DU PÉCHÉ

director

1923

POUR UNE NUIT D'AMOUR

director

1924

AELITA

director

1925

HIS CALL/BROKEN CHAINS

director

1926

THREE THIEVES/THE CASE OF THE THREE MILLION

director

1927

THE FORTY-FIRST director

1927

THE MAN FROM THE RESTAURANT

director

1928

THE LASH OF THE CZAR/THE WHITE EAGLE director

1929

AN HOUR WITH CHEKHOV/RANKS AND PEOPLE

director

1930

HOLIDAY OF ST. JORGEN director

1930

THREE THIEVES

director

1931

SIBERIAN PATROL/TOMMY

director

1934

MARIONETTES

director

1937

WITHOUT DOWRY director

1941

SALAVAT YULAYEV

director

1943

ADVENTURES IN BOKHARA/NASREDDIN IN BUKHARA

director



Dziga Vertov (1896 - 1954)
Dziga Vertov was born as Denis Abramovich (later changed to Arkadievich) Kaufman to a
Jewish book-dealer's family. His younger brothers, renowned Soviet documentary filmmaker
Mikhail Kaufman and cameraman Boris Kaufman, would later establish their own niches
in film history. As a child he studied piano and violin, and at the age of ten began to write
poetry; Vertov's films would reflect these early interests.
After WWI started the Kaufman family fled to Moscow. In 1916 Vertov enrolled in Petrograd
Psychoneurological Institute. For his studies of human perception, he recorded and edited
natural sounds in his "Laboratory of Hearing," trying to create new sound effects by means of
rhythmic grouping of phonetic units. Familiar with the Russian Futurist movement, he took
on the pseudonym "Dziga Vertov" (loosely translated as "spinning top"). In 1918 Mikhail
Koltstov, who headed Moscow Film Committee's newsreel section, hired Vertov as his
assistant. Among Vertov's colleagues were Lev Kuleshov, who was conducting his legendary
montage experiments, and Edouard Tissé, Eisenstein's future cameraman. Vertov would recall
later that they were most strongly influenced by Griffith's INTOLERANCE.
Vertov began to edit documentary footage and soon was appointed editor of Kinonedelya, the
first Soviet weekly newsreel. His first film as a director was THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE
REVOLUTION (1919), followed by two shorts, BATTLE OF TSARITSYN (1920) and THE
AGIT-TRAIN VTSIK (1921), and the thirteen-reel HISTORY OF CIVIL WAR (1922). In
editing those documentaries, Vertov was discovering the possibilities of montage. He began
joining pieces of film without regard for chronology or location to achieve an expressiveness
which would politically engage the viewers.
In 1919 Vertov and his future wife, the talented film editor Elisaveta Svilova, plus several
other young filmmakers created a group called Kinoks ("kino-oki," meaning cinema-eyes).
In 1922 they were joined by Mikhail Kaufman, who had just returned from the civil war.
From 1922 to 1923 Vertov, Kaufman, and Svilova published a number of manifestos in avant-
garde journals which clarified the Kinoks' positions vis-á-vis other leftist groups. The Kinoks

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rejected "staged" cinema with its stars, plots, props and studio shooting. They insisted that the
cinema of the future be the cinema of fact: newsreels recording the real world, "life caught
unawares." Vertov proclaimed the primacy of camera ("Kino-Eye") over the human eye.
The camera lens was a machine that could be perfected infinitely to grasp the world in its
entirety and organize visual chaos into a coherent, objective picture. At the same time Vertov
emphasized that his Kino-Eye principle was a method of "communist" deciphering of the
world. For Vertov there was no contradiction here; as a true believer he considered Marxism
the only objective and scientific tool of analysis and even called a series of the 23 newreels he
directed between 1922 and 1925 Kino-Pravda, "pravda" being not only the Russian word for
the truth but also the title of the official party newspaper.
Nevertheless, Vertov's films weren't mere propoganda. Created from documentary footage,
they represented an intricate blend of art and rhetoric, achieved with a sophistication that,
among Vertov's contemporaries, would be rivaled only by Leni Riefenstahl. Vertov's
achievement was also his tragedy. He considered his films documentaries, but they also
strongly reflected his personal, highly emotional poetic vision of Soviet reality, a vision he
maintained throughout his life. As early as the mid-1920s Vertov was arousing suspicion
from party authorities with his utopian and ecstatic cine-tracts and his pioneering techniques,
including slow and reverse motion, "candid camera" tricks, bizarre angles, shooting in
motion, split screens and multiple superimpositions, the inventive use of still photography,
constructivist graphics, animation and most importantly rapid montage that sometimes
consisted of only several frames. All these advances also left the masses indifferent. Among
filmmakers Vertov acquired the reputation of an eccentric, an extremist who rejected
everything in cinema except for the Kinoks' work. Fortunately Vertov, like Eisenstein,
received the support of the influential European avant-garde. His feature-length KINO-
EYE—LIFE CAUGHT UNAWARES (1924) was awarded a silver medal and honorary
diploma at the World Exhibit in Paris, and that success led to two more films commissioned
by Moscow: STRIDE, SOVIET! (1926) and A SIXTH OF THE WORLD (1926).
By now, the central authorities were fed up with Vertov's formal experimenting, and they
refused to support his most ambitious project, THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA
(1929). To make the film, Vertov had to accept the invitation of the film studio VUFKU in the
Ukraine, where he moved with Svilova and Kaufman. These changes resulted in the collapse
of the Kinoks group and by the time the project was finally realized there were already several
similar "city symphonies" completed by such innovative filmmakers as Alberto Cavalcanti
(in Paris), Mikhail Kaufman (in Moscow) and Walter Ruttmann (in Berlin). Then too,
Vertov's youngest brother Boris Kaufman, who lived in France, was about to start shooting A
PROPOS DE NICE for Jean Vigo. However, Vertov's film was significantly different from
its brethren: its goal was not only to present a mosaic of the life of a city (a combination of
Kiev, Moscow and Odessa) by use of the most advanced cinematic means, but also to engage
spectators in theoretical discourse on the relationship between film and reality, on the nature
of cinematic language and human perception.
In so doing Vertov was at least 30 years ahead of his time: his ideas of the self-reflective
cinema, of the viewer identifying himself with the filmmaking process, would reemerge only
at the end of the fifties in the work of Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Snow and
Stan Brakhage. But in 1929, when THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA was publicly
released, it was too obscure, even for Eisenstein. Mikhail Kaufman was also dissatisfied by
the final version of the film and it marked the end of his collaboration with Vertov.
In the transition to sound Vertov outstripped Eisenstein and most of the other silent cinema
masters. He was prepared for the sound revolution because of his early experiments with
noise recording, and in A SIXTH OF THE WORLD he had even discovered substitutes for
the human voice: by using various prints in his intertitles and by rhythmically alternating

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the phrases with images, Vertov achieved the illusion of off-screen narration. His first sound
picture, ENTHUSIASM: DONBASS SYMPHONY (1931), was an instant success abroad;
Chaplin wrote that he had never imagined that industrial sounds could be organized in such a
beautiful way and named ENTHUSIASM the best film of the year. Yet at home it was widely
ridiculed as cacophony, in spite of its ideological fervor. Vertov's next film, THREE SONGS
OF LENIN (1934), made in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of Lenin's death,
had to wait six months for its official release, allegedly because it had failed to emphasize
the "important role" of Stalin in the Russian Revolution. Subsequently, the proper footage
was added. In spite of these complications, the film turned out to be a popular success both at
home and abroad. Even those who had little reason to adore Lenin couldn't help praising the
overall elegance of its structure, the elegiac fluidity of montage, the lyrical inner monologue
and the highly expressive and technologically innovative synchronous sound shots of people
talking.
In spite of such success, by the end of the 1930s Vertov was deprived of any serious
independent work. He was not persecuted, like many of his avant-garde friends; he lived for
almost 20 years in obscurity, editing conventional newsreels, the same kind of films he had
once proven so capable of transforming into art.
Six years after his death, French documentary filmmakers Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin
adopted Vertov's theory and practice into their method of cinéma vérité. In recent years
Vertov's heritage of poetic documentary has influenced many young filmmakers all over
the world. In 1962 the first Soviet monograph on Vertov was published, followed by Dziga
Vertov: Articles, Diaries, Projects, which was published in English as Kino-Eye, The
Writings of Dziga Vertov. In 1984, in commemoration of the 30th anniversary of Vertov's
death, three New York organizations—Anthology Film Archives, the Collective for Living
Cinema and Joseph Papp's Film at the Public—mounted the first American retrospective of
Vertov's work, with panels and lectures by leading Vertov scholars and screenings of films by
Vertov's contemporaries and his followers from all over the world.
1919

ANNIVERSARY OF THE REVOLUTION/GODOUSCHINE REVOLYUTSII
director

1919

CINEMA WEEK/KINO-NEDELYA director

1922

HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR/ISTORIYA GRAZHDANSKOY VOYNY
director

1924

KINO-EYE—LIFE CAUGHT UNAWARES/KINO-GLAZdirector

1925

CINEMA-TRUTH/KINO-PRAVDA director

1926

A SIXTH OF THE WORLD/SHESTAYA CHAST MIRA director

1926

STRIDE, SOVIET/SHAGAI, SOVIET

director

1928

THE ELEVENTH YEAR/ODINNADTSATYI

director

1929

THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA/CHELOVEK S KINOAPPARATOM
director

1931

ENTHUSIASM: DONBASS SYMPHONY/ENTUZIASM: SIMFONIYA DONBASA
director

1934

THREE SONGS OF LENIN/TRI PESNI O LENINE

director

1937

LULLABY/KOLIBELNAYA

director

1937

SERGE ORDJONIKIDZE

director

1938

THREE HEROINES/TRI GEROINI director

1954

NEWS OF THE DAY/NOVOSTNI DNIA director


Lev Kuleshov (1899 - 1970)
Undeservedly overlooked by film historians, Lev Kuleshov was the first theorist of Soviet
cinema whose experiments with juxtaposing the face of an actor and various other images

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revealed the impact of montage. Pudovkin and Eisenstein have often been credited with
this discovery, although their own testimony shows they credited Kuleshov, who was their
teacher.
In 1917, just before the Revolution, the 18-year-old Kuleshov made his first short film,
THE PROJECT OF ENGINEER PRITE, and published his first articles which reflected an
expressionistic vision, comparable to that of German filmmakers, and exceptionally advanced
for the relatively primitive state of Russian cinema. His radical aesthetics suited the leaders of
the Revolution and he was dispatched to lead a corps of cameramen on the eastern front.
In peacetime Moscow, Kuleshov joined the faculty of the First State Film School, only to
be sent to the western front to document a Polish uprising. These experiences informed ON
THE RED FRONT (1920), but the style of the film owed a great deal to American chase
films and D.W. Griffith, whose INTOLERANCE exerted a strong influence on Kuleshov
and his teaching. These American enthusiasms would eventually cause Kuleshov political
problems, particularly after BY THE LAW (1926), adapted from a Jack London story about
the Klondike gold rush.
Meanwhile, however, Kuleshov's famous "films without film" workshops, held from
1920 to 1923, prepared filmmakers for the days when they could obtain raw stock to put
in their empty cameras. Kuleshov's next important work was THE EXTRAORDINARY
ADVENTURES OF MR. WEST IN THE LAND OF THE BOLSHEVIKS (1924), a comedy
about an American confused and exploited by Revolutionaries. A steady output of films, THE
DEATH RAY (1925), BY THE LAW, THE JOURNALIST (1927), THE GAY CANARY
(1929), TWO-BULDI-TWO (1929) and FORTY HEARTS (1931), paralleled his career as a
gifted teacher, but his increasing emphasis on internationalism made him a target of Stalinists
in the 30s and his filmmaking career was temporarily halted in 1933.
In 1940, he was allowed to make THE SIBERIANS, followed by INCIDENT ON A
VOLCANO (1941), TIMOUR'S OATH (1942) and WE FROM THE URALS (1944),
but these were films with no particular appeal beyond the USSR. Kuleshov's considerable
importance to Soviet filmmaking, including the publication of his classic textbook on
direction (Fundamentals of Film Direction, 1941) was not acknowledged until 1960, when
film historian Jay Leyda published Kino, a reassessment of Soviet film history. With his
significance now recognized even in the West, Kuleshov was invited to sit on juries of film
festivals and attend retrospectives of his work.
1917

CHERNAIA TREX DNEI

art director

1917

KOROL PARIZHA

art director

1917

NABAT

art director

1917

TENI LIUBVIart director

1917

ZA SCHASTEM

director, art director, performer

1917

ZHIZN TREX DNEI art director

1918

MISS MERI

art director

1918

PESN'LIUBVI NEDOPETAIA

director, art director, performer

1918

THE PROJECT OF ENGINEER PRITE/PROEKT INZHENERA PRAITA
director, art director

1918

SLIAKOT BULVARNAIA art director

1918

VDOVA

art director

1920

ON THE RED FRONT/NA KRASNOM FRONTE director, screenwriter, performer

1924

THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF MR. WEST IN THE LAND OF THE

BOLSHEVIKS/NEOBYCHAINYE PRIKLUCHENIYA MISTERA VESTA V STRANYA
BOLSHEVIKOV

director, screenwriter

1925

THE DEATH RAY/LUCH SMERTI director, performer

1926

BY THE LAW/PO ZAKONU

director

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1926

PAROVOZ NO. 10006

director

1927

YOUR ACQUAINTANCE/ZHURNALISTA

director

1929

THE GAY CANARY/VESELAIA KANARAIKA director

1930

DVA-BULDI-DVA

director

1930

SASHA

screenwriter

1931

FORTY HEARTS/SOROKSERDETS

director

1932

GORIZONT director, screenwriter

1933

VELIKII UTESHITEL

director, screenwriter, art director

1934

DOHUNDA

director

1934

THEFT OF SIGHT

production supervisor

1940

SIBERIANS/SIBIRAKI

director

1941

INCIDENT IN A VOLCANO/SLUCHAI V VULKANE

director

1942

TIMOUR'S OATH/KLIATVA TIMURA

director

1943

BOEVOI KINOSBORNIK 13

director

1944

WE FROM THE URALS/MY S URALA

director


Sergei Eisenstein (1898 - 1948)
As a youth, Sergei Eisenstein attended the science-oriented Realschule, to prepare himself
for engineering school. However, he did find time for vigorous reading in Russian, German,
English and French, as well as drawing cartoons and performing in a children's theater troupe
which he founded. In 1915, he moved to Petrograd to continue his studies at the Institute of
Civil Engineering, his father's alma mater. On his own, he also studied Renaissance art and
attended avant-garde theater productions of Meyerhold and Yevreinov.
After the February 1917 Revolution, he sold his first political cartoons, signed Sir Gay, to
several magazines in Petrograd. He also served in the volunteer militia and in the engineering
corps of the Russian army. Although there is little record that Eisenstein was immediately
affected by the events of October 1917, in the spring of 1918 he did volunteer for the Red
Army. His father joined the Whites and subsequently emigrated. While in the military,
Eisenstein again managed to combine his service as a technician with study of theater,
philosophy, psychology and linguistics. He staged and performed in several productions, for
which he also designed sets and costumes.
In 1920 Eisenstein left the army for the General Staff Academy in Moscow where he joined
the First Workers' Theater of Proletcult as a scenic and costume designer. After he gained
fame from his innovative work on a production of The Mexican, adapted from a Jack
London story, Eisenstein enrolled in his idol Meyerhold's experimental theater workshop
and collaborated with several avant-garde theater groups, all of whom shared a mistrust
of traditional art forms and "high" culture in general. The new theater's contribution to the
revolutionary cause was to destroy the old art entirely and create a new, democratic one. The
young Soviet artists resorted to "low" culture—circus, music hall, sports, fair performances—
to educate the largely illiterate Russian masses in a "true" communist spirit.
Eisenstein's studies of commedia dell'arte paid off in his 1923 staging of The Sage, a huge
success not only as propaganda but also as sheer entertainment. For that production he made a
short comic film, GLUMOV'S DIARY (1923), a parody of newsreels whose hero's grotesque
metamorphoses anticipated the metaphors of STRIKE (1924), Eisenstein's first feature. But
even more important for his career as a filmmaker was the structure of The Sage. Eisenstein
took an old Ostrovsky play and reassembled it as a series of effective, circus-like attractions.
The assemblage of such shocking scenes, as he claimed in his 1923 manifesto, The Montage
of Attractions, would lead the public's attention in a direction planned by the "montageur."
Having studied the films of Griffith, Lev Kuleshov's montage experiments and Esfir Shub's
re-editing techniques, Eisenstein became convinced that in cinema one could manipulate time

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and space to create new meanings, epecially if the images were not to be merely linked, as
Kuleshov suggested, but juxtaposed. Because at that time he believed that his duty as an artist
was to contribute to the forging of the new life for his country, Eisenstein eagerly embraced
the film medium as the most efficient tool of communist propaganda. However, as much as
STRIKE was a condemnation of czarism, it was also an innovative work of art. With this
film, an inexperienced director immediately caught up with the work of Soviet, German and
French avant-garde filmmakers. STRIKE is filled with expressionistic camera angles, mirror
reflections and visual metaphors. In a story of police spies, the camera itself turns into a spy,
a voyeur, a trickster. The film was the first full display of Eisenstein's bold new cinematic
grammar, a montage of conflicting shots that served as words and sentences endowed with the
maximum power of persuasion. Although his command of this new technique was shaky—
some sequences did not convey the intended message—STRIKE was a ground-breaking
accomplishment.
As Eisenstein's second film, the enormously successful and influential POTEMKIN (1925),
demonstrated, his art could be even more powerful when it achieved a balance between
experimental and traditional narrative forms. If STRIKE was an agitated visual poem arousing
emotions within a receptive audience, POTEMKIN, the fictionalized story of one of the tragic
episodes of the 1905 Russian revolution, was a work of prose, highly emotional but clear in
its logical, public speech. The close-ups of suffering human faces and the soldiers' boots in
the now legendary "Odessa steps" sequence carried such impact that some screenings of the
film outside the USSR provoked clashes with police when audiences were convinced they
were watching a newsreel.
Later in his career Eisenstein would compare the film director's art with the craft of a shaman.
But in the 20s he was trying hard to find a rational basis for it: in Bekhterv's reflexology, in
Russian formalist literary theory, in Marxist dialectics. As his films became more complex,
they raised the ire of the new breed of ideologues who called for art accessible to the
masses and flexible enough to illustrate the latest party line. However, Eisenstein was too
deeply involved with his personal research to follow everyday politics. Thus, OCTOBER,
commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the October revolution of 1917 was not released
until 1928; for one thing, all sequences featuring Trotsky, one of the leaders of the revolt, had
to be deleted. Then too, the authorities were disappointed with Eisenstein, for while the edited
OCTOBER was considered ideologically correct, its confusing structure and abundance of
abstract metaphors diminished it propagandistic message, and it did not carry the same impact
as POTEMKIN. Attacking him for the "sins of formalism," critics claimed that he "lost his
way in the corridors of the Winter Palace" and pointed to the more intelligible anniversary
films shot by his colleagues on more modest budgets and in less time. In a way, the critics
were correct; in none of his other films was Eisenstein's search for the new cinematic
language so radical.
After OCTOBER, Eisenstein was able to resume work that had been interrupted on THE
GENERAL LINE (1929), a film meant to demonstrate the advantages of collective labor in
the village. However, during the production of OCTOBER, the party policy toward peasantry
had drastically changed from persuasion to coercion, and the film's surrealistic imagery
and sophisticated montage, which anticipated Godard, were considered inappropriate.
Stalin summoned Eisenstein and his co-director Grigori Alexandrov and ordered them to
make radical changes. They made a few cuts and immediately embarked on a trip abroad
to investigate the new sound technology. With Eisenstein out of the country, the film was
released under the neutral title OLD AND NEW to vicious attacks. His claim that the film
was an experiment which could be understood by the millions was ridiculed as wishful
thinking; according to one of his critics, the public needed "simple, realistic pictures with
clear plot."

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Meanwhile, Eisenstein's reception in Europe nurtured his opinion that he could be both avant-
garde artist and creator of popular and ideologically "correct" films. In every country he
visited he was hailed by radical students and intellectuals. He met with Joyce, Cocteau, Abel
Gance, Marinetti, Einstein, Le Corbusier, and Gertrude Stein, all of whom seemed excited
about his work. In May 1930 Eisenstein arrived in the United States, where he lectured at
several Ivy League schools before moving on to Hollywood, where he hoped to make a
film for Paramount. Although he was welcomed by leading Hollywood figures, including
Fairbanks, von Sternberg, Disney and especially Chaplin, who became his close friend, his
proposal for an adaptation of An American Tragedy was rejected as too complicated, as were
several other highly original projects.
Just before he left America, Eisenstein was encouraged by Robert Flaherty and Diego Rivera
to make a film about Mexico, and in December 1930, with funding from writer Upton
Sinclair, he began work on QUE VIVA MEXICO. This project, which promised to become
Eisenstein's most daring, took a tragic turn when Sinclair, caving in to pressures from his
family, who cited financial reasons, and Stalin, who was afraid that Eisenstein might defect,
cancelled the film with shooting almost finished. Although Eisenstein was told the footage
would be sent to Moscow for editing, he was never to see it again.
Upset over the loss of his footage and shocked at the differences in the political and cultural
climate that he noticed after three years abroad, he suffered a nervous breakdown. One after
another, his ideas for projects were bluntly rejected, and he became the target of intense
hostility from Boris Shumyatsky, the Soviet film industry chief whose objective was to create
a Stalinist Hollywood. With his bitter memories of commercial filmmaking and strong ties to
European modernism, Eisenstein could not make the switch to directing cheerful agitkas and
was thus perceived as a threat. He took an appointment to head the Direction Department at
the Moscow film school and became a devoted teacher and scholar. In January 1935, he was
villified at the All-Union Conference of Cinema Workers but eventually was allowed to start
working on his first sound film, BEZHIN MEADOW.
On this notorious project Eisenstein tried to create a universal tragedy out of the true story of
a young communist vigilante who informed on his father and was murdered in retaliation by
the victim's relatives. The authorities wanted to demonstrate that family ties should not be an
obstacle to carrying out one's duty—a theme common to Soviet and German cinema of the
time. Why Eisenstein agreed to deal with such dubious subject matter is not clear, but what
has been saved from the allegedly destroyed film suggests that he once again confounded
the Soviet authorities' expectations. After BEZHIN MEADOW was banned, Eisenstein had
to repent for his new "sins of formalism." As one Soviet film scholar put it, "Eisenstein was
apologizing for being Eisenstein."
As if to save his life, Eisenstein next made ALEXANDER NEVSKY (1938), a film about
a 13th-century Russian prince's successful battle against invading German hordes. This
monumental costume epic starring familiar character actors was a striking departure from
Eisenstein's principles of montage and "typage" (casting non-professionals in leading
roles). NEVSKY was a deliberate step back, in the direction of old theater or, even worse,
opera productions which Eisenstein has been fiercely opposed to in the 20s. Still, the film
demonstrated Eisenstein in top form in several sequences, such as the famous battle scene on
the ice. Also significant were his attempts to achieve synthesis between the plastic elements
of picture and music with the film's memorable score by Prokofiev, possibly reflecting
Eisenstein's prolonged admiration for the cartoons of Walt Disney.
NEVSKY was a huge success both in the USSR and abroad, partially due to growing anti-
German sentiment, and Eisenstein was able to secure a position in the Soviet cinema at a
time when many of his friends were being arrested. On February 1, 1939, he was awarded the
Order of Lenin for NEVSKY and shortly thereafter embarked on a new project, The Great

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Fergana Canal, hoping to create an epic on a scale of his aborted Mexican film. Yet after
intense pre-production work the project was cancelled, and following the signing of the non-
aggression treaty between the USSR and Germany, NEVSKY was quietly shelved as well. In
February 1940, in a Radio Moscow broadcast to Germany, Eisenstein suggested that the pact
provided a solid basis for cultural cooperation. At that time he was commissioned to stage
Wagner's opera Die Walküre at the Bolshoi theater. At the November 21, 1940, premiere,
the German diplomats in Moscow, not unlike Stalin's henchman before them, were dismayed
by Eisenstein's artistry. They accused him of "deliberate Jewish tricks." Yet when the Nazis
attacked Russia less than a year later, it was Die Walküre's turn to be banned while NEVSKY
could once again be screened.
In 1941 Eisenstein was commissioned to do an even larger scale historic epic, a three-
part film glorifying the psychopathic and murderous 16th-century Russian czar, Ivan the
Terrible. However, IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART ONE (1943) was an enormous success
and Eisenstein was awarded the Stalin Prize. But IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART TWO
(1946) showed a different Ivan: a bloodthirsty tyrant, the unmistakable predecessor of Stalin.
Naturally, IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART TWO was banned and the footage of IVAN THE
TERRIBLE PART THREE destroyed. Eisenstein was hospitalized with a heart attack, but he
recovered and petitioned Stalin to be allowed to revise IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART TWO
as the bureaucracy wanted, only to be dismissed. In fact, Eisenstein was too weak to resume
shooting, and he died in 1948, surrounded by unfinished theoretical works and plans for new
films. IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART TWO was first shown in 1958 on the 60th anniversary
of Eisenstein's birth. In 1988, at the international symposium at Oxford marking Eisenstein's
90th anniversary, Naum Kleiman, the director of the Eisenstein Museum in Moscow, showed
a scene that survived from IVAN THE TERRIBLE PART THREE. In it, Ivan is interrogating
a foreign mercenary in a manner resembling one of Stalin's secret police.
With the abundance of literature on Stalin's crimes now available even in the USSR, the
significance of IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART TWO as a document of its tragic time has
diminished, but as a work of art it is still significant. In his last completed film, Eisenstein
achieved what he had dreamt of since 1928, when he saw a Japanese Kabuki troupe
performance: the synthesis of gesture, sound, costume, sets and color into one powerful,
polyphonic experience. Both NEVSKY and Walküre were steps in that direction, but only the
celebrated danse macabre of Ivan's henchmen comes close to the synthesis of the arts which
has haunted artists for ages.
Eisenstein's death prevented him from summing up his theoretical views in the areas of
the psychology of creativity, the anthropology of art and semiotics. Although not many
filmmakers have followed Eisenstein the director, his essays on the nature of film art have
been translated into several languages and studied by scholars of many nations. Soviet
scholars published a six-volume set of his selected works in the 60s. 1988 saw the publication
of a new English-language edition of his writings.
1923

GLUMOV'S DIARY/KINODNEVIK GLUMOVA director, screenwriter, editor,

performer
1924

STRIKE/STACHKA director, screenwriter, story, editor

1925

POTEMKIN/BRONENOSETS POTYOMKIN/BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN
director, screenwriter, editor, performer

1928

OCTOBER/OKTYABAR/TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD

screenwriter

1928

OCTOBER/OKTYABAR/TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE WORLD

director

1929

THE GENERAL LINE/GENERALNAYA LINYA/OLD AND NEW

director,

screenwriter, editor
1929

STURM UBER LA SARRAZ

director, performer

1930

ROMANCE SENTIMENTALE

director

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1937

BEZHIN MEADOW/BEZHIN LUG director

1938

ALEXANDER NEVSKY/ALEKSANDR NEVSKI editor, sets, costumes

1939

FERGHANA CANAL

director, screenwriter

1941

AN APPEAL TO THE JEWS OF THE WORLD

performer

1943

IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART ONE/IVAN GROZNY PART I

producer, director,

dialogue, editor
1943

SEEDS OF FREEDOM

director

1946

IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART TWO/IVAN GROZNY PART II producer, director,

dialogue, editor
1947

IVAN THE TERRIBLE PART III

director, screenwriter

1979

QUE VÍVA MEXICO/TIME IN THE SUN co-director, screenwriter


Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893 - 1953)
Pudovkin is often designated as the second great artist of the Soviet silent film; his
accomplishments have often taken a back seat to those of his more bellicose contemporary,
Sergei Eisenstein. The difference between the two directors is typified in the oft-quoted
statement of French critic Léon Moussinac: "Pudovkin's films resemble a song, Eisenstein's
a scream." But if Eisenstein gained notoriety as the more resolutely avant-garde film artist, it
was Pudovkin who arguably made the more enduring contributions to the medium, refining
the body of techniques—pioneered by D.W. Griffith—which today compose the seamless
continuity of the psychological film.
Pudovkin's entrance into the arts came at the relatively late age of 27. After studying
chemistry, he was drafted into the military service, was wounded in 1915 and spent three
years in a prisoner of war camp. During that time he learned to speak English, German and
Polish. Upon his release, Pudovkin went to work in the laboratory of a military plant, but a
viewing of Griffith's INTOLERANCE had a profound effect on him and in 1920 he decided
to abandon chemistry in favor of a career in cinema.
Pudovkin began to study under Vladimir Gardin, one of the few successful prewar directors
to continue working after the Revolution. Working as both actor and assistant director,
Pudovkin's projects with Gardin included SICKLE AND HAMMER (1921) and HUNGER…
HUNGER… HUNGER (1921), the latter a film which attempted to increase public awareness
about a famine devastating the Ukraine.
In 1922 Pudovkin left Gardin to join the seminal group of film talents—which included
Eisenstein—working under Lev Kuleshov at the State Film School. There he participated in
the famous series of editing experiments designed to demonstrate how montage is responsible
for the psychological coherence of cinematic cognition. For the group's first feature,
THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF MR. WEST IN THE LAND OF THE
BOLSHEVIKS (1924), Pudovkin wrote the screenplay, was an assistant director, and played
a role. He also wore several hats, as writer, designer, and actor, in the workshop's next project,
THE DEATH RAY (1925)—a film intended to showcase the collective's comprehensive
knowledge of the medium.
Pudovkin was commissioned by "Mezraboom-Russ" to make an educational film
popularizing the principles of Pavlov's studies in reflex conditioning. MECHANICS OF THE
BRAIN (1926) allowed the director to practice a disciplined application of his principles
of film exposition; it also initiated his career-long relationship with cameraman Anatoli
Golovnya, who worked almost exclusively with Pudovkin. Before this project was completed,
Pudovkin directed a short, CHESS FEVER (1925), a comedy which incorporated footage
from Moscow's International Chess Tournament of 1925.
Pudovkin's next film would secure his place in the history of cinema. Adapted from
Maxim Gorky's novel by Pudovkin's frequent scenarist, Nathan Zarkhi, MOTHER (1926)

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distinguishes Pudovkin as a director of economy and precision. The film demonstrates his
methodological differences with Eisenstein; Pudovkin advocated a theory of linkage, in
which montage "builds" not for an Eisensteinian abstraction but the impact of emotional
identification. To support that theory, Pudovkin choses to structure his tale of the Revolution
around its effect on an individual.
His next project, THE END OF ST. PETERSBURG (1927), was, like Eisenstein's OCTOBER
(1928), commissioned in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. The
Russian public, familiar with the rivalry between the two men, saw the films as a way of
comparing the virtues of their philosophies. Pudovkin's film, the first of many to benefit
from the assistance of Mikhail Doller, was well-received and its sophisticated analysis of
the Revolution is considered by some critics to be superior to Eisenstein's effort. Pudovkin's
later films saw the director "increasingly seduced by the charm of the image," as in STORM
OVER ASIA (1928)/THE HEIR OF GENGHIS KHAN, a film on which Pudovkin also began
to run afoul of the stringent and constricting ideological specifications of the Party. Although
popular with audiences and well-received abroad, the film was officially condemned for
the "formalist indulgence" of its cinematic sheen. Pudovkin's last silent film, STORM OVER
ASIA, achieved a level of accomplishment and recognition that the director would never
reach again.
To contemporary film students, Pudovkin is perhaps best known for his books of film theory,
Film Director and Film Material (1926) and Film Scenario and Its Theory (1926), which were
later combined into one volume, Film Technique. Although many of his ideas are tied to the
techniques of silent film, Pudovkin's writing is still studied in many film courses all over the
world.
1920

IN DAYS OF STRUGGLE

performer

1921

HUNGER…HUNGER…HUNGER director, screenwriter

1921

SICKLE AND HAMMER

director, performer

1923

THE LOCKSMITH AND THE CHANCELLOR

screenwriter

1924

THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF MR. WEST IN THE LAND OF

BOLSHEVIKS

assistant director, screenwriter, performer

1925

BRICKLAYERS

performer

1925

CHESS FEVER

director

1925

THE DEATH RAY/LUCH SMERTI director, performer

1926

MECHANICS OF THE BRAIN

director, screenwriter

1926

MOTHER/MAT'

director, screenwriter

1927

THE END OF ST. PETERSBURG

director

1928

STORM OVER ASIA/THE HEIR OF GENGHIS KHAN director

1929

THE HAPPY CANARY

performer

1929

THE LIVING CORPSE

performer

1929

THE NEW BABYLON

performer

1929

ZHIVOI TRUP

editor, performer

1933

THE DESERTER

director

1938

A SIMPLE CASE

director

1939

MININ AND POZHARSKI director

1940

SUVOROV

director

1940

TWENTY YEARS OF CINEMA

director

1940

VICTORY

director

1941

THE FEAST AT ZHIRMUNKA

director

1942

MURDERERS ARE ON THEIR WAY

director

1943

IN THE NAME OF THE HOMELAND

director, screenwriter

1943

IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART ONE/IVAN GROZNY PART I

performer

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1946

ADMIRAL NAKHIMOV

director, performer

1946

IVAN THE TERRIBLE, PART TWO/IVAN GROZNY PART II performer

1948

TRI VSTRECHI

director

1950

ZHUKOVSKY

director

1953

VOZVRASHCHENIE VASILIYA BORTNIKOVAdirector


Alexander Dovzhenko (1894 - 1956)
Born to illiterate, impoverished peasants who were descendants of Cossacks, Alexander
Dovzhenko completed his education and left the Desna River Valley to become a school
teacher. His aspirations in the arts led to involvement in literary circles after the Communist
Revolution of 1917, a revolution he embraced as the first step toward Ukrainian national
independence. He joined the army and later studied art in Berlin. In 1923, he returned to
his beloved Ukraine to launch a career as an illustrator. His painter's eye was expressed in
detailed political cartoons and book illustrations which supported the "People's Republic."
His films would express his strong ties to Ukrainian culture, particularly in the romantically
nationalistic ZVENYHORA (1928) and ARSENAL (1929), considered his most complete and
masterful works.
With no formal training and little knowledge of how a film is made, Dovzhenko, having
explored the potential of writing, painting and architecture, turned suddenly to what he
considered a perfectly political medium by assuming an apprenticeship at the film studios
at Odessa. His first film, VASYA THE REFORMER (1926), was a laughable attempt at
comedy.
Dovzhenko's enduring contribution to world cinema is found in the poetic vision of
ARSENAL (1929) and EARTH (1930), contemplative, rhythmically edited works that one
critic called "biological, pantheistic conception(s)."
Stylistically, Dovzhenko's work, as exemplified by EARTH, is a montage of associations
and impressions. The film has very little camera movement or movement within the frame.
Narrative flow is the product of editing and composition, with each shot composed and
framed according to the director's painterly vision.
After serving as a war correspondent for Red Army and Izvestia during WWII, Dovzhenko
assumed writing and producing chores at Mosfilm studios. But for years he complained
of creative suffocation in Stalin's political bureaucracy, which caused several Dovzhenko
projects to be shelved.
Although his final output was relatively modest, it was the young Dovzhenko, along with
his contemporaries V.I. Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein, who best combined the principle of
montage with a realistic appreciation for the natural landscape.
1926

LOVE'S BERRIES

director, screenwriter

1926

VASYA THE REFORMER/VASYA REFORMATOR

director, screenwriter

1927

THE DIPLOMATIC POUCH

director, adaptation, performer

1928

ZVENYHORA

director

1929

ARSENAL

director, screenwriter

1930

EARTH/ZEMLYA/SOIL

director, screenwriter, editor

1932

IVAN director, screenwriter

1935

AEROGRAD director, screenwriter

1939

SHCHORS

director, screenwriter

1940

LIBERATION/OSVOBOZHDENIE director, screenwriter, editor

1941

ALEKSANDR PARKHOMENKO

production supervisor

1941

BOGDAN KHMELNITSKII production supervisor

1945

STRANA RODNAYA

director, editor, commentary

1948

MICHURIN

producer, director, screenwriter— from play

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1958

POEM OF THE SEA/POEMA O MORYE screenwriter

1960

CHRONICLE OF FLAMING YEARS/POVEST PLAMENNIKH LET

screenwriter


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